Scylla & Charybdis

Rather Is Thrown Out of Court

2009-09-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

No big surprise here, except that the failure of the lower court to have tossed out this lawsuit evinces the putrid state of affairs in our courts:

Appeals Court Tosses Dan Rather and His CBS Lawsuit into the Back Alley

NEW YORK – A New York court on Tuesday dismissed Dan Rather's $70 million breach of contract lawsuit against CBS Corp., noting that the network continued to pay the anchor $6 million a year even after he left the evening news broadcast.

Rather sued CBS and its top executives in 2007, claiming he had been removed from his "CBS Evening News" anchor post over a report that examined President George W. Bush's military service. The Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court — New York's trial-level court
— said the complaint "must be dismissed in its entirety. The five-judge panel ruled unanimously that a lower court should have tossed out the suit from the git-go. The court said there was no breach of contract, because CBS still paid Rather his $6 million annual salary after the disputed 2004 broadcast under the "pay or play" provision of his contract...."

Irony alert: Dan Rather got a free shot at trying to swing the 2004 Presidential Election with forged documents, and almost got a free shot with a jury to collect a $70 million reward for his troubles. Meanwhile, in a similar suit, former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin is facing a criminal trial for his alleged participation in a forged document case which was intended to dash the electoral standing of then-candidate, and now French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 2004, during a corruption investigation—of the 1991 sale of frigates to Taiwan—an investigating magistrate was given bank records originating from a Luxembourg-based clearing house called Clearstream. The listings were supposed to name potential recipients of kickbacks in the frigate affair. The names included ... a handful of top politicians—including two variations on the name of then finance minister Nicolas Sarkozy. But it turned out the names on the list were fakes, added to real bank records by a fraudster in a frame-up effort.

Sarkozy, reasonably, believed the fraud was a smear campaign to block his road to the French presidency. ... One party with the motive and the opportunity, if not to add the names himself then to push for a corruption investigation when he allegedly knew the listings were fake, was Dominique de Villepin. At the time, Villepin, the dashing foreign minister who captured the world's attention and French hearts in 2003 with a speech before the United Nations in a failed effort to preempt the Iraq War, reportedly fancied his own chances for a presidential run. (Chirac named Villepin prime minister in 2005, serving until Sarkozy won the presidency in 2007.)
The trial due to conclude Oct. 23 will aim to resolve what Villepin knew, and when, and what he did with the information he had. He is charged with "complicity" in defamation and the dissemination of forged documents.

Bummer wonders, When did France become the adult of the world of peevish children?

Left Wing Militias, Oh My!

2009-04-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

Bummer has been away for a while. The leaked Homeland Security report about the potential danger of resurgent right wing militias, brought me out of hibernation.

Rather than give blah blah blah about it, I have reproduced the report, below, EXCEPT that I did a global "change all" of 3 words, and in 4 other places I substituted one phrase for another. That's 7 changes, in total. (It would be better if I made 15 changes, but you'll get the gist)

I believe that with those 7 word changes, the report rebuts itself. That is, it is meaningless in substance (at best), and worse is just pure political polemic (as hopefully demonstrated below).

IA-0257-09
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

(U//FOUO) Leftwing Extremism:
Current Economic and Political
Climate Fueling Resurgence in
Radicalization and Recruitment
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

(U) LAW ENFORCEMENT INFORMATION NOTICE: This product contains Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) information. No portion of the LES information should be released to the media, the general public, or over non-secure Internet servers. Release of this information could adversely affect or jeopardize investigative activities.
(U) Warning: This document is UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY (U//FOUO). It contains information that may be exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552). It is to be controlled, stored, handled, transmitted, distributed, and disposed of in accordance with DHS policy relating to FOUO information and is not to be released to the public, the media, or other personnel who do not have a valid need-to-know without prior approval of an authorized DHS official. State and local homeland security officials may share this document with authorized security personnel without further approval from DHS.
(U) All U.S. person information has been minimized. Should you require the minimized U.S. person information, please contact the DHS/I&A Production Branch at
IA.PM@hq.dhs.gov, IA.PM@dhs.sgov.gov, or IA.PM@dhs.ic.gov.

(U//FOUO) Leftwing Extremism: Current
Economic and Political Climate Fueling
Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment
7 April 2009

(U) Prepared by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division. Coordinated with the FBI.

(U) Scope
(U//FOUO) This product is one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the
phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is
provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement
officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks
against the United States. Federal efforts to influence domestic public opinion must be
conducted in an overt and transparent manner, clearly identifying United States
Government sponsorship.

(U) Key Findings
(U//LES) The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific
information that domestic leftwing* terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,
but leftwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about
several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first
African American president present unique drivers for leftwing radicalization and
recruitment.

— (U//LES) Threats from black supremacist and violent antigovernment groups during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent acts. Nevertheless, the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for leftwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.

— (U//LES) Leftwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda, but they have not yet turned to attack planning.

(U//FOUO) The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1960’s - 1970s when leftwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.

— (U//FOUO) During the 1960’s - 1970s, these issues contributed to the growth in the
number of domestic leftwing terrorist and extremist groups and an increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks, and infrastructure sectors.

— (U//FOUO) Growth of these groups subsided in reaction to increased government scrutiny as a result of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and disrupted plots, improvements in the economy, and the continued U.S. standing as the preeminent world power.

(U//FOUO) The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.

* (U) Leftwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular economic, religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly anticapitalist, rejecting personal autonomy in favor of social-governmental authority, or rejecting personal autonomy entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as abortion or immigration.

— (U//FOUO) Proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans likely would attract new members into the ranks of leftwing extremist groups, as well as potentially spur some of them to begin planning and training for violence against the government. The high volume of purchases and stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by leftwing extremists in anticipation of restrictions and bans in some parts of the country continue to be a primary
concern to law enforcement.

— (U//FOUO) Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to leftwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that leftwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

(U) Current Economic and Political Climate
(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that a number of economic and political factors are driving a resurgence in leftwing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity. Despite similarities to the climate of the 1960’s - 1970s, the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years. In addition, the historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a driving force for leftwing extremist recruitment and radicalization.

— (U) A recent example of the potential violence associated with a rise in leftwing extremism may be found in the shooting deaths of three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 4 April 2009. The alleged gunman’s reaction reportedly was influenced by his racist ideology and belief in antigovernment conspiracy theories related to gun confiscations, citizen detention camps, and a Jewish-controlled “one world government.”

(U) Exploiting Economic Downturn
(U//FOUO) Leftwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures. Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish “financial elites.” These “accusatory” tactics are employed to draw new recruits into leftwing extremist groups and further radicalize those already subscribing to extremist beliefs. DHS/I&A assesses this trend is likely to accelerate if the economy is perceived to worsen.

(U) Historical Presidential Election
(U//LES) Leftwing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool. Many leftwing extremists are protagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms onership and use. Leftwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment. From the 2008 election timeframe to the present, leftwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers.

(U//FOUO) Perceptions on Poverty and Radicalization
(U//FOUO) Scholars and experts disagree over poverty’s role in motivating violent radicalization or terrorist activity. High unemployment, however, has the potential to lead to alienation, thus increasing an individual’s susceptibility to extremist ideas. According to a 2007 study from the German Institute for Economic Research, there appears to be a strong association between a parent’s unemployment status and the formation of leftwing extremist beliefs in their children—specifically xenophobia and antidemocratic ideals. From the 2008 election timeframe to the present, leftwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers.

— (U//LES) Most statements by leftwing extremists have been rhetorical, expressing concerns about the election of the first African American president, but stopping short of calls for violent action. In two instances in the run-up to the election, extremists appeared to be in the early planning stages of some threatening activity targeting the Democratic nominee, but law enforcement interceded.

(U) Revisiting the 1960’s - 1970s
(U//FOUO) Paralleling the current national climate, leftwing extremists during the
1960’s - 1970s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes to increase group visibility
and recruit new members. Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s
opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those
with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties as
well as black supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion,
inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage. During the 1960’s - 1970s, these issues contributed to the growth in the number of domestic leftwing terrorist and extremist groups and an
increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks,
and infrastructure sectors.

(U) Economic Hardship and Extremism
(U//FOUO) Historically, domestic leftwing extremists have feared, predicted, and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and “end times” prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons. These teachings also have been linked with the radicalization of domestic extremist individuals and groups in the past, such as violent Christian Identity organizations and extremist members of the militia movement.

(U) Illegal Immigration
(U//FOUO) Leftwing extremists were concerned during the 1960’s - 1970s with the perception
that illegal immigrants were taking away American jobs through their willingness to
work at significantly lower wages. They also opposed free trade agreements, arguing that
these arrangements resulted in Americans losing jobs to countries such as Mexico.

(U//FOUO) Over the past five years, various leftwing extremists, including militias and black supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, immigration or strident anti-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that leftwing extremist groups’ frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration has the potential to incite individuals or small groups toward violence. If such violence were to occur, it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets.

— (U//FOUO) DHS/I&A notes that prominent civil rights organizations have observed an increase in anti-Hispanic crimes over the past five years.
— (U) In April 2007, six militia members were arrested for various weapons and explosives violations. Open source reporting alleged that those arrested had discussed and conducted surveillance for a machinegun attack on Hispanics.
— (U) A militia member in Wyoming was arrested in February 2007 after communicating his plans to travel to the Mexican border to kill immigrants crossing into the United States.

(U) Legislative and Judicial Drivers
(U//FOUO) Many leftwing extremist groups perceive recent gun control legislation as a threat to their right to bear arms and in response have increased weapons and ammunition stockpiling, as well as renewed participation in paramilitary training exercises. Such activity, combined with a heightened level of extremist paranoia, has the potential to facilitate criminal activity and violence.

— (U//FOUO) During the 1960’s - 1970s, leftwing extremist hostility toward government
was fueled by the Vietnam War.

— (U//FOUO) On the current front, legislation has been proposed this year
requiring mandatory registration of all firearms in the United States. Similar legislation was introduced in 2008 in several states proposing mandatory tagging and registration of ammunition. It is unclear if either bill will be passed into law; nonetheless, a correlation may exist between the potential passage of gun control legislation and increased hoarding of ammunition, weapons stockpiling, and paramilitary training activities among leftwing extremists.

(U//FOUO) Open source reporting of wartime ammunition shortages has likely spurred leftwing extremists—as well as law-abiding Americans—to make bulk purchases of ammunition. These shortages have increased the cost of ammunition, further exacerbating leftwing extremist paranoia and leading to further stockpiling activity. Both leftwing extremists and law-abiding citizens share a belief that rising crime rates attributed to a slumping economy make the purchase of legitimate firearms a wise move at this time.

(U//FOUO) Weapons rights and gun-control legislation are likely to be hotly contested subjects of political debate in light of the 2008 Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller in which the Court reaffirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but left open to debate the precise contours of that right. Because debates over constitutional rights are intense, and parties on all sides have deeply held, sincere, but vastly divergent beliefs, violent extremists may attempt to co-opt the debate and use the controversy as a radicalization tool.

(U) Perceived Threat from Rise of Other Countries
(U//FOUO) Leftwing extremist paranoia of foreign regimes could escalate or be magnified in the event of an economic crisis or military confrontation, harkening back to the “New World Order” conspiracy theories of the 1960’s - 1970s. The dissolution of Communist countries in Eastern Europe and the end of the Soviet Union in the 1960’s - 1970s led some leftwing extremists to believe that a “New World Order” would bring about a world government that would usurp the sovereignty of the United States and its Constitution, thus infringing upon their liberty. The dynamics in 2009 are somewhat similar, as other countries, including China, India, and Russia, as well as some smaller, oil-producing states, are experiencing a rise in economic power and influence.

— (U//FOUO) Fear of Communist regimes and related conspiracy theories characterizing the U.S. Government’s role as either complicit in a foreign invasion or acquiescing as part of a “One World Government” plan inspired extremist members of the militia movement to target government and military facilities in past years.

— (U//FOUO) Law enforcement in 1996 arrested three leftwing militia members in Battle Creek, Michigan with pipe bombs, automatic weapons, and military ordnance that they planned to use in attacks on nearby military and federal facilities and infrastructure targets.

— (U//FOUO) Leftwing extremist views bemoan the decline of U.S. stature and have recently focused on themes such as the loss of U.S. manufacturing capability to China and India, Russia’s control of energy resources and use of these to pressure other countries, and China’s investment in U.S. real estate and corporations as a part of subversion strategy.

(U//FOUO) Lone Wolves and Small Terrorist Cells
(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent leftwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Information from law enforcement and nongovernmental organizations indicates lone wolves and small terrorist cells have shown intent—and, in some cases, the capability—to commit violent acts.
— (U//LES) DHS/I&A has concluded that black supremacist lone wolves pose the most
significant domestic terrorist threat because of their low profile and autonomy—separate from
any formalized group—which hampers warning efforts.
— (U//FOUO) Similarly, recent state and municipal law enforcement reporting has warned of the dangers of leftwing extremists embracing the tactics of “leaderless resistance” and of lone
wolves carrying out acts of violence.
— (U//FOUO) Arrests in the past several years of radical militia members in Alabama, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania on firearms, explosives, and other related violations indicates the emergence of small, well-armed extremist groups in some rural areas.

(U) Disgruntled Military Veterans
(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that leftwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat. These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists—including lone wolves or small terrorist cells—to carry out violence. The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1960’s - 1970s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.

— (U) After the Vietnam War, some returning military Veterans joined or associated with leftwing extremist groups.

— (U) A prominent civil rights organization reported in 2006 that “large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other black supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.”

— (U//LES) The FBI noted in a 2008 report on the black supremacist movement that some returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined extremist groups.

(U) Outlook
(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that the combination of environmental factors that echo the 1960’s - 1970s, including heightened interest in legislation for tighter firearms restrictions and returning military veterans, as well as several new trends, including an uncertain economy and a perceived rising influence of other countries, may be invigorating leftwing extremist activity, specifically the black supremacist and militia movements. To the extent that these factors persist, leftwing extremism is likely to grow in strength. (U//FOUO) Unlike the earlier period, the advent of the Internet and other information age technologies since the 1960’s - 1970s has given domestic extremists greater access to information related to bomb-making, weapons training, and tactics, as well as targeting of individuals, organizations, and facilities, potentially making extremist individuals and groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe. New technologies also permit domestic extremists to send and receive encrypted
communications and to network with other extremists throughout the country and abroad, making it much more difficult for law enforcement to deter, prevent, or preempt a violent extremist attack.

(U//FOUO) A number of law enforcement actions and external factors were effective in limiting the militia movement during the 1960’s - 1970s and could be utilized in today’s climate.
— (U//FOUO) Following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, the militia movement declined in total membership and in the number of organized groups because many members distanced themselves from the movement as a result of the intense scrutiny militias received after the bombing.
— (U//FOUO) Militia membership continued to decline after the turn of the millennium as a result of law enforcement disruptions of multiple terrorist plots linked to violent leftwing extremists, new legislation banning paramilitary training, and militia frustration that the “revolution” never materialized.
— (U//FOUO) Although the U.S. economy experienced a significant recovery and many erceived a concomitant rise in U.S. standing in the world, black supremacist groups continued to experience slight growth.
(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in leftwing extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive leftwing extremist radicalization.

(U) Reporting Notice:
(U) DHS encourages recipients of this document to report information concerning suspicious or criminal activity to DHS and the FBI. The DHS National Operations Center (NOC) can be reached by telephone at 202-282-9685 or by e-mail at NOC.Fusion@dhs.gov. For information affecting the private sector and critical infrastructure, contact the National Infrastructure Coordinating Center (NICC), a sub-element of the NOC. The NICC can be reached by telephone at 202-282-9201 or by e-mail at NICC@dhs.gov. The FBI regional phone numbers can be found online at http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm. When available, each report submitted should include the date, time, location, type of activity, number of people and type of equipment used for the activity, the name of the submitting company or organization, and a designated
point of contact.
(U) For comments or questions related to the content or dissemination of this document, please contact the DHS/I&A Production Branch at IA.PM@hq.dhs.gov, IA.PM@dhs.sgov.gov, or IA.PM@dhs.ic.gov.
(U) Tracked by: CRIM-040300-01-05, CRIM-040400-01-05, TERR-010000-01-05

DuckSpeak 2008: Kiss or Kill?

2008-04-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or have the insipid, repetetive talking points -- designed to talk around and past things, rather than address them -- bring to a full circle the Orwellian Duckspeak?

DuckSpeak: Cadenced enthymeme for the disengaged. OK, Orwell and Socrates said it differently. Cf, the 1990's "Keep it simple, Stupid" from the Clinton camp.

The old game was Kiss-or-Kill. Now its C-E-D or K-I-L-L.

Almost 3 decades ago, a preacher/lecturer at my college (he was African American, then known as "black," with "negro" then being in the wrenching process of being discarded as an acceptable self- or other-identifier) back when Reagan was President, explained the oratory of the southern Baptist and other charismatic Christian church preachers. (He did this as we analyzed the book Elmer Gantry, about a cynical, scoundrel [insert all kinds of other bad characteristics] preacher.)

The teacher explained that in black churches, the preachers use the technique of the enthymeme, coupled with cadence. The audience, filled with the spiritual emotion of the gathering, would bond with the cadence of the speaker. Typically, repetitive phrases were used (as well as rhymes). He gave an example like this:

Are we going to let Satan control our lives? [No! comes the chorus]
Are we going to let Satan control our children? [No!]
Are we going to let Satan win this great struggle? [No!]
Are we going to let Satan rule our local school board? [No!]
Are we going to usher Satan's law into our schools? [No!]
Are we going to let Satan have a seat on our school board? [No!]
[unstated premise goes here]
Are we going to let [John Smith] get elected to our school board [No!]

[John Smith] was toast. The audience had accepted the unstated premise - that [John Smith] was Satanic.

My preacher teacher explained why he felt the cadenced enthymeme was so effective. The premise is that conclusions that one makes, have the advantage of inertia. It will take a strong assault to dislodge those conclusions. [Enter, cognitive dissonance, or CogDis, as Bummer likes to call it, which is related.] In the example above, the audience likely has no opinion of John Smith. But when they emerge from church, they have a fallback opinion now - [John Smith] is Satanic, and they have come to this conclusion on their own, via their passive acceptance of the unstated premise in the preacher's enthymeme, delivered in cadence or in rhyme, for easy downloading to the brain.

This is more effective that a straight-forward sermon, the topic of which is, "[John Smith] is the devil." That sermon may involve a different part of the brain.

The enthymeme is much easier. And, it sticks. Because our brains have pride in the conclusions we come to, all by ourselves. So my brand new belief -- a neural pathway by which I have connected "Satan" with "[John Smith]" -- enjoys a position at the top of the hill. Anyone who wishes to dislodge this conclusion has the burden of proof. That is the advantage of inertia.

Ergo, in mass politics, DuckSpeak is effective. Cadenced Enthymeme Duckspeak. C-E-D.

The repetitive rhymes of Barack Obama? Cadenced enthymeme Duckspeak.
The homespun K-I-S-S fabriations of Hillary? Not quite as effective as Obama's Duckspeak.

Fatties

2007-12-20T14:53:00.000-08:00

What if Fat Doesn't Make You Fat?

"When the U.S. Surgeon General's Office set off in 1988 to write the definitive report on the dangers of dietary fat, the scientific task appeared straightforward. Four years earlier, the National Institute of Health (NIH) had begun advising every American old enough to walk to restrict fat intake, and ... the Surgeon General's Office itself had just published its 700-page landmark "Report on Nutrition and Health," declaring fat the single most unwholesome component of the American diet. All of this was apparently based on sound science. So the task before the project officer was merely to gather that science together in one volume, have it reviewed by a committee of experts, which had been promptly established, and publish it.

"The project did not go smoothly, however. Four project officers came and went over the next decade. ... Finally, in June 1999, 11 years after the project began, the Surgeon General's Office circulated a letter ... explaining that the report would be killed.

"Bill Harlan, a member of the oversight committee and associate director of the Office of Disease Prevention at NIH, says "the report was initiated with a preconceived opinion of the conclusions," but the science behind those opinions was not holding up. "Clearly the thoughts of yesterday were not going to serve us very well."

"During the past 30 years, the concept of eating healthy in America has become synonymous with avoiding dietary fat. The creation and marketing of reduced-fat food products has become big business; over 15,000 have appeared on supermarket shelves. Indeed, an entire research industry has arisen to create palatable nonfat fat substitutes, and the food industry now spends billions of dollars yearly selling the less-fat-is-good health message. The government weighs in as well, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) booklet on dietary guidelines, published every 5 years, and its ubiquitous Food Guide Pyramid, which recommends that fats and oils be eaten "sparingly." The low-fat gospel spreads farther by a kind of societal osmosis, continuously reinforced by physicians, nutritionists, journalists, health organizations, and consumer advocacy groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which refers to fat as this "greasy killer."

" 'In America, we no longer fear God or the communists, but we fear fat,' says David Kritchevsky of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, who in 1958 wrote the first textbook on cholesterol.

"Despite decades of research, it is still a debatable proposition whether the consumption of saturated fats above recommended levels (step one in the chain) by anyone who's not already at high risk of heart disease will increase the likelihood of untimely death (outcome three). Nor have hundreds of millions of dollars in trials managed to generate compelling evidence that healthy individuals can extend their lives by more than a few weeks, if that, by eating less fat. To put it simply, the data remain ambiguous as to whether low-fat diets will benefit healthy Americans. Worse, the ubiquitous admonishments to reduce total fat intake have encouraged a shift to high-carbohydrate diets, which may be no better--and may even be worse--than high-fat diets.

"Since the early 1970s, for instance, Americans' average fat intake has dropped from over 40% of total calories to 34%; average serum cholesterol levels have dropped as well. But no compelling evidence suggests that these decreases have improved health. Although heart disease death rates have dropped--and public health officials insist low-fat diets are partly responsible--the incidence of heart disease does not seem to be declining, as would be expected if lower fat diets made a difference.

"Meanwhile, obesity in America, which remained constant from the early 1960s through 1980, has surged upward since then--from 14% of the population to over 22%. Diabetes has increased apace. Both obesity and diabetes increase heart disease risk, which could explain why heart disease incidence is not decreasing. That this obesity epidemic occurred just as the government began bombarding Americans with the low-fat message suggests the possibility, however distant, that low-fat diets might have unintended consequences--among them, weight gain. "Most of us would have predicted that if we can get the population to change its fat intake, with its dense calories, we would see a reduction in weight," admits Harlan. "Instead, we see the exact opposite."

"In the face of this uncertainty, skeptics and apostates have come along repeatedly, only to see their work almost religiously ignored as the mainstream medical community sought consensus on the evils of dietary fat. For 20 years, for instance, the Harvard School of Public Health has run the Nurses' Health Study and its two sequelae--the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and the Nurses' Health Study II--accumulating over a decade of data on the diet and health of almost 300,000 Americans. The results suggest that total fat consumed has no relation to heart disease risk; that monounsaturated fats like olive oil lower risk; and that saturated fats are little worse, if at all, than the pasta and other carbohydrates chat the Food Guide Pyramid suggests be eaten copiously. "

Will You Still Be Green If It Cools?

2007-12-20T14:31:00.000-08:00

Bummer likes clean green stuff and generally thinks the stinking polluted world should be cleaned up.

The devil, of course, is in the details.

Bummer's green attitude isn't a reaction to the Global Warming chicken-little ("the sky is falling! the sky is falling!"), because even if the Earth was not warming up a bit, Bummer would still be in favor of cleaning up the Earth.

That is, Bummer's greenness is not dependent upon any temperature trend. So, color Bummer true green.

Having said that, Bummer is a tad bit reluctant to jump on the bandwagon of chronic science-class flunk-outs (i.e., Hollywood actors and politicians) who claim that the Global Warming Debate is somehow "over" or "decided."

(Yeah, just like the relationship between dietary fat and health is "decided"....wait, over 2000 clinical studies and none - zero - have established a statistically significant correlation....)*

Anyhoo, a little grist for the mill:

U.S. Senate Report : Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007

____
* - What if the anti-dietary fat movement has all been a big lie?. Cf Gary Taube's research, here.

Corn and Mape-el Syrup

2007-12-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

Bummer knows corn, but Iowahawk knows humor:

The rain spattered against my office windows as the facts swum about my head. Was I about to become a patsy in another one of Rove's media rubouts? And who, exactly, was on first? That's when she walk in. 115 pounds of Fact-Checking dynamite.

"Hey stranger, got a light?"

It was Mapes.

Bummer's Second Favorite Bill Clinton Quote

2007-11-17T17:51:00.000-08:00

For all that Bill Clinton did to open world trade (kudos!) before selling out in order to (unsucessfully) assuage trade union demands in the 2000 election, he certainly started from a clueless position:

"You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?"

---US President-elect Bill Clinton in 1993, appalled to learn that a free market (Alan Greenspan, representative) was not required to rubber-stamp his fiscal and monetary decisions; as quoted by Bob Woodward in his book, "The Agenda."

Tony Snow's Speaks of Effete Thugs in the Media

2007-11-05T07:29:00.000-08:00

Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow received a Freedom of Speech Award on October 16, 2007 from The Media Institute. He gave an acceptance speech. Hmm...White House Press Secretary during wartime, contracts cancer, gives major speech to a media organization after his tenure ends.

Should have made a few national magazine covers, right?

Nope. Because Tony is dialed into the reactor core of the effete media machine. Of course his words will be buried -- they are bad for the effete thugs.

Here's the text - enjoy:

Remarks of Tony Snow
Upon Receiving Freedom of Speech Award From The Media Institute
Friends & Benefactors Awards Banquet
Washington, D.C.
October 16, 2007

Thank you for this award. lam not quite sure why I have received it, but I´m not inclined to ask or complain. Instead, I´ll express my gratitude by giving the First Amendment a good workout for the next few minutes.

First, a confession: I love the news business. I spent 28 years in newspapers, television and radio, and no doubt will return in some fashion to all three.

Few professions are as stimulating, unpredictable or fun. At its best, journalism serves as an unending graduate school — a place where one constantly must learn new things, meet new people, encounter everything from garden-variety evil to shimmering new advances on the intellectual and cultural scene, and stand on history´s sidelines, while someone pays you for the adventure. That´s a great deal by any standard.

The First Amendment, as others have noted, serves as the foundation for the enterprise, and supports reporters in their quest for truth .- or at least for serviceable facts that in time might lead them toward some reasonable facsimile of truth.

We also hear that the First Amendment is under siege. I think that´s true. I don´t believe anyone here would disagree with the proposition that the quality of public discourse isn´t what it once was or that it presently achieves levels of excellence and depth that it desperately needs to reach.

Yet, while it may be tempting to blame the usual suspects — the government, interest groups, angry factionalists — those forces frequently have always tried to restrict the free flow of ideas, and they always have failed.

They´re not the culprits here. Instead, there´s a new and unexpected menace on the block:

The media.

Let me explain. American journalism finds itself in a highly unusual predicament. In the early days of this nation, the press was wild, untamed, and omnipresent. Papers sprouted everywhere, and not even Ben Franklin could resist the temptation to turn his printing presses
into devices for spreading gossip, maligning political enemies, and entertaining readers with items ranging from the important to the grandly weird.

Then came a period of consolidation and gentrification. Moguls controlled major media

outlets and a handful of elite institutions — the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the three television networks — shaped and defined not merely what counted as news, but what counted as acceptable opinion. The press lost its Wild West flavor and became what Tom Wolfe described as “a Victorian gent.”

Lately, we have returned to the Wild West, thanks to the advent of new media, and nobody knows quite how to handle it. Ideas and controversies are erupting from every pore of American society — from blogs, talk radio, internet news and chat sites, and online video forums. The rich no longer have a monopoly on distributing ideas and views; everyone can do it, and millions are.

Technology has democratized the media. You can get whatever you want somewhere on the net, including a lot of attention-seeking rage. In fact, hysteria seems to have become something of a driver in certain quarters of the blogosphere.

Political rhetoric has turned nasty, childish, and very personal, especially on Capitol Hill, and Americans are sick of it. Hotheads seem to be enjoying a false spring of fame. And members of the mainstream press are scratching their heads and asking, “What´s going on here?” Why are the nation´s newspapers hemorrhaging readers? Why are the television networks losing viewers? Why has cable news suddenly hit still water? What is going on? Don´t Americans care about the news?

Well, of course they do: The problem is, they don´t think they´re getting news — and they´re right.

Three factors explain the sudden crisis facing once-mighty keepers of the First Amendment flame.

The first is sheer smugness. Reporters and editors for three decades have sneered at accusations of bias, as if the claim were novel — it is not — unthinkable — it is not — or false — which it also is not.

The major media organs in this country have become purveyors of conventional wisdom — generally, conventional liberal wisdom. The Roper Organization conducted a poll after the 1992 election and discovered that 93 percent of Washington political reporters voted for Bill Clinton. Only 2 percent identified themselves as “conservative.”

Subsequent surveys have indicated a similar spread in party affiliation, which makes the Washington Press Corps the most reliable Democratic voting bloc in the nation.

This is not a smear or a criticism. It is a fact, and it´s worth examining. My theory is that liberal — Democratic — sympathies flourish among reporters for very practical reasons. Democrats ran every major institution in Washington for 62 years — between 1932 and 1994. That´s the longest string of effective one-party rule in the history of democracy. Reporters knew that to get news, they needed to cultivate the people who made the news — who shaped legislation, who passed the laws, who peopled government departments and agencies — in other words, the people who really pull the levers in Washington. They needed to know elected officials, staffers, bureaucratic gnomes — the vast bulk of whom were Democrats.

Year in, year out, reporters and sources worked together. Over time, many became friendly, if not friends. They attended the same parties. Their kids went to the same schools. They shared stories of their ambitions and fears. They developed empathy for one another.

Reporters knew liberal arguments inside and out, because they heard them all the lime from their sources. Meanwhile, they remained strangers to conservative viewpoints, even (or especially) during the heyday of the Reagan Revolution.

I will never forget receiving several calls the day after the surprising Republican landslide in 1994. Political reporters called me, a known conservative in the journalism fraternity, seeking introductions to the exotic breed known as Republicans.

The scribes harbored no personal animosity toward conservatives. They just weren´t used to dealing with them. They felt the need to approach them cautiously, with the blend of suspicion and fear you might feel if someone asked you to stroke a Gila monster.

That presumption of strangeness lingers today — again, not out of malice toward the right, but as a product of blank incomprehension. Reporters as a whole understand one side far better than the other — and thus have slid out of touch with a nation that still sees itself pretty evenly divided on political matters. The ideological sameness of major news organizations is bad journalism, bad business and bad for the First Amendment, which was designed to foment ferocious debate — not orthodoxy.

In response to this neo-orthodoxy, competing media have arisen to fill the void. These include talk radio, conservative blogs and internet sites, and the like. It is telling that Fox News — which from experience I can tell you stresses the importance of telling both sides — gets hammered just for giving conservatives equal time and equal respect.

Some of these new media and their practitioners are every bit as blinkered as the old media — often by design. There´s a pretty vigorous market these days for over-the-top hate_mongering on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Predictably, however, that sort of stuff is beginning to wear thin, and really shrill combatants are beginning to lose market share. The growing national discontent over the tone of political debate ought to make it clear that it´s silly to ignore competing ideas. To do so is to lose a chance to learn.

Afree press is supposed to relish and weigh ideas, not discard some simply on the basis of polite fashion. It´s a good thing to walk in someone else´s shoes, to try to see the world as they do. The quest permits one to look at issues and events from different angles and perspectives, to encounter new ways of thinking, and to add to one´s mental toolkit. It makes an already interesting job even more stimulating, and can make smart reporters even sharper when it comes to understanding national stories and trends.

But smugness isn´t the only threat to the First Amendment. Political correctness also stands in the way. It routinely imposes the kind of censorship journalists ought to hate most — prior restraint. It forbids the mere contemplation or acknowledgment of views that ruffle the feathers of self-appointed arbiters of the acceptable. These grandees usually find some kindly explanation for their banning of forbidden topics and thoughts — the communications in question hurt people´s feelings, invoke stereotypes, that sort of thing. But let´s be clear: the First Amendment didn´t create allowances for censors.

The Constitution´s authors would have grasped the utter frivolity of political correctness. It isn´t necessary. American society has a wonderful record of rejecting demagogues and verbal exhibitionists, without prodding or intervention from self-appointed scolds. The votaries of hatred and division occasionally have their day, but never for long. Americans have little
patience for tub-thumping maniacs, and they reject demagogues with regular and ruthless efficiency.

In fact, the average Joe is far less susceptible to shabby fads than the PC police, who have become so ubiquitous and whose ministrations have become so absurd that even my elementary- school children are making fun of them — and not because Daddy has prompted them to do so.

Unfortunately, some in the press have adopted PC etiquette and practice without coercion from a Grand Inquisitor. There are questions some media organizations simply don´t ask. For instance, is racism as bad as it was two decades ago? The answer is no. If you doubt it, check out your kids. They´re refreshingly devoid of the bigotry and self-consciousness that characterized our youth. This is an immensely positive development, but nobody dares acknowledge it. It´s forbidden. And so race-baiters generate headlines, while healers and innovators toil unnoticed.

And what about conventional wisdom? For months, the media avoided asking about progress in Iraq. Despite repeated reports from the field that Iraqis had turned against al Qaeda, the news seldom made it into newspapers, and almost never on front pages. Last week, the military reported that civilian deaths in Iraq had hit their lowest point since 2003. U.S. and Iraqi deaths and casualties similarly had declined. So what led the paper the next morning? Stories about Blackwater. The statistics that put the war in perspective were relegated to the back pages of the Washington Post and in some publications, to oblivion.

Avigorous press must be one in which reporters challenge their own sympathies and assumptions as aggressively as they challenge the sympathies and assumptions of others. Unfortunately, that too seldom happens, with the consequence that opinion-mongering has driven out straight news.

[The Second Factor -ed]. Let me turn to an entirely different threat to the First Amendment: The endless news cycle. Americans love news. We can´t get enough news, and we now can slake our thirsts at any time by jumping on the internet or watching cable news.

These new media specialize in speed — instant reportage, instant analysis, instant controversy. Unfortunately, the print media haven´t adjusted very effectively to the new competition. Rather than trying to develop a market for deeper analysis of the rich debates swirling in this nation, newspapers have decided to play copycat. Reporters who once had the luxury of trying to drill into stories now have to file hurried one-paragraph updates for the online editions of the papers.

The business has become a full-time sprint, with air time and top-of-the-fold placement at a premium. These competitive pressures have pushed news organizations toward three kinds of easy stories that always can be updated, and can be counted upon to generate interest.

First are process stories. These pieces let journalists share tiny shards of information about the inside operations of the government: “Today, the president had orange marmalade with his toast. In a dramatic departure from past practice, the toast was white.”

“Speaker Pelosi will meet at 3 pm with a delegation from Iraq.” Or: “We have a rumor about the next departure from the White House!”

These are all quaintly interesting, but largely trivial. Reporters nevertheless find themselves under constant pressure to accumulate and disgorge factoids, so they can be the first to recite them on camera, publish them online — and, of course, leak to Drudge.

Conflict stories provide a second source of low-hanging fatal fruit. Example: Harry Reid calls the president a liar. Reporters get word of the insult on their blackberries. They demand an immediate response from the White House press secretary.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. It happens all the time. I have stood at the White House podium, watching reporters unholstering their blackberries and looking at urgent communications from the home office. Within moments, the questions come like hurled fruit:

Everyone wants to know about some utterance or event that took place or were reported after the briefing itself began — things about which I knew nothing, including the larger context. The point of such questions isn´t to get content and context right: It´s to play gotcha— to make public officials respond to insults and insinuations rather than ideas and facts.

Now, far be it from me to derogate the heat-seeking one-liner. Insults have a long and proud place in American politics. One of my favorites took place years ago, when drug testing was all the rage. A pretender to Fritz Hollings´ s seat demanded that the old boy take a drug test. This prompted Hoilings to reply: “I´ll take a drug test just as soon as my opponent takes an I.Q. test.”

That, my friends, is a wonderful insult. It´s also a lousy surrogate for analysis or information.

In one of those horrid quandaries that now form the bane of editors´ existence, consumers claim to despise such stories. They´re lying, of course — as ratings and web hits demonstrate.
People love juicy, titillating, humiliating, crass, gross and slimy tales — always have. Millions will stare slack-jawed at car ambling down the 5 in Los Angeles, or gobble up the latest about Brittney and her babies. Sensational stories are incredibly tough to avoid — but they shouldn´t form the bulk of Washington reportage.

[The third facor- ed] The third news-cycle pox: Polls. Polls provide a ripe source for conflict because pollsters regularly reduce complex questions to queries of mind-numbing simplicity: Do you want America out of the war? Would you like it if the government guaranteed health care? Should the government guarantee full employment? Should we spend more on education? Should we cut your taxes?

The answer to each of the above is, “Well, sure!” But note that the questions are asked in a vacuum, as if the object of a respondent´s desire could be had for free, without consequences. Pollsters routinely ask if people would like something unobtainable — guaranteed employment, for example — and politicians take the wistful answers as holy writ.

Someone opposed to a guaranteed employment scheme can expect to be accused of supporting joblessness or hating the poor, at which point the mud would fly on both sides — all because of a poll question based on an idiotic assumption. Dumb questions beget dumb debate.

In short, media organizations have been seduced by process, conflict and polling stories, and along the way have sacrificed the tradition of looking for creative ways to understand and explain the world. They have become hostages to the easy and shallow stuff and strangers to stories that touch people´s hearts and characterize their actual lives.

Indeed, journalists seem to have developed an elitist contempt for the daily concerns of viewers, listeners and readers — and the public has noticed. This explains the across-the-board slippage in newspaper circulation, and viewership of broadcast and cable news.

This brings me to the final dangerous factor — a cramped view of the First Amendment itself. News organizations gleefully embrace the First Amendment´s protection of a free press, but what about the two other freedoms — of religion and assembly? The three are linked indissolubly. The assail one is to weaken the other two.

But the journalistic establishment doesn´t seem to appreciate this fact. Religion in this country — Christianity especially — has been redefined as a menace, rather than a bulwark of our social order. Schools no longer acknowledge Christmas, for instance, but they celebrate Kw an z a a
The onslaught against traditional religion is palpable and real. Despite this, religion flourishes — revealing a profound and growing disconnect between the journalistic establishment and the public, not to mention the political elites who have put many of the strictures in place.

The press does a horrible job of discussing religion — reporters are less likely to attend worship service than the public generally, and are less likely to take a skeptical view of those who want to constrain religious expression. In some cases, one can almost hear a muffled cheer when a court or organization puts a muzzle on those who merely want to express their religious beliefs.

Similarly, we spend too little time defending the rights of people to assemble freely, including those determined to make perfect fools of themselves by expressing outré views.

Campaign-finance reform is an abomination to the First Amendment. It limits the ability of citizens to express political views during political campaigns, thus taking the attack on free assembly into realm of electronic communications. The McCain-Feingold law has restricted the right of people to express themselves in the most basic public forum of all — the political town square.

Predictably, campaign-finance reform did what it always does: It reduced the power of average citizens to affect political campaigns, and strengthened the hands of the wealthiest among us. McCain-Feingold destroyed political parties and educational and organizational institutions, drove out moderating voices, lifted the lid on spending — there´s talk of a billion- dollar presidential race next year — and seems only to have enhanced the standing of cranky billionaires.

I´ve raced through a lot of issues here, but you get the point: The media have embraced practices and policies that actually erode First Amendment freedoms and weaken the practice of journalism itself.

Now, I´ll conclude with good news and bad news.

First, the bad: The public hates politics and the press. People don´t trust either institution, even though they sustain our system of free intellectual enterprise. Those of us involved in either profession — or in my case, both — shouldn´t complain. We need to ask how things reached this state, and how we can fix the problem.

Now the good news: I don´t think any of the weaknesses I have cited are inherent or irreversible. I have spent nearly 30 years of my life in the business of journalism, and with luck, I´ll get 30 more. I love the business and the people who work in it.

My experience as White House press secretary confirmed what I always have known:

Reporters and curious, aggressive, eager to learn, and interested in ideas. They share many of the frustrations I have mentioned this evening. They want to range wider, dig deeper and explore more broadly than they can today. They hate censorship. They love what they do. They see it as a noble calling. They want to get better at their jobs, and they want to grind their competitors into dust.

They know the public has become sick of vicious political discourse and the media who pass it on. They know the country teems with new kinds of stories, incredible innovations, novel ways of attacking the problems we all confront.

But everyone needs to realize that the days of the old-fashioned newsroom are over. It´s a different world out there — wilder, more competitive, and much less predictable than even a decade ago.

Rather than cursing innovation, journalists need to embrace it. They need to get out of their cubicles and plunge into the task that drew most of us into the business in the first place — the challenge of engaging a chaotic world filled with willful fellow human beings; a world of joy and agony; of triumph and crushing failure; a world united by love and atomized by hatreds and aggression,

The democratic media provide new tools for examining our world, new competitors for reporting about that world, and new reminders to the press establishment that markets really do work — and people want better than they´re getting.

Icome not to bury journalism, but to celebrate and challenge it. It´s a cliché that every crisis presents an opportunity, but it´s true: The democratization of the media is a good thing. We now face competition from all quarters — including from people who have specialized expertise that journalists lack. We ought to welcome the new participants in the game and learn from them. They should do the same with us.

There´s an old boast in the business — that the job of ajournalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The thing is, we never realized that we were becoming The Comfortable — with good pay, job security, and access to movers and shakers all around the world. We need to cast off our coziness — venture away from safe stories and presumptions and into the wilderness of new topics, new ideas and new sources of information.

In that quest lies the possibility of fulfillment and joy — and the hope of keeping alive the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.

Criminal Fakery

2007-10-24T22:33:00.000-07:00

The Rathergate cast of characters got off scott-free from their violations of the Texas felony forgery statutes.

Mr. Victoria Plame, aka Joseph Wilson the unanimously declared Liar, got off despite having violated the "section 1001" prohibiton against lying to federal agents.

Sandy Burglar Berger got wrist-slapped for felony destruction of evidence, i.e. the Clinton records regarding inaction against al qaeda.

John Kerry got a pass from the MSM for claiming to be "Citizen Soldier", complete with Steven Spielberg edits of retakes from Kerry's 8mm super 8 Vietnam camera, even though Kerry got a less than honorable discharge from the Naval Reserve, under Carter's amnesty program.

Now, finally, the phony soldier Beauchamp is getting some heat, including that he confessed to having fabricated his abuse stories, and then went media silent after being read his "rights" and having been advised by a lawyer hired by TNR, to shut his mouth and not recant his story. "Don't ask and don't tell" for the new Millenium.

Rather Mouthfoam - "I Will Leak TANG Memos to the Times if You Don't Let Me Run This Story on CBS"

2007-10-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

Dan hits bottom, uses pick axe to dig further:

DAN RATHER VOWED TO LEAK BUSH GUARD DOCS TO NEW YORK TIMES -- IF CBS SPIKED

Former CBSNEWS anchor Dan Rather pressured CBS to air the failed Bush/National Guard story in September 2004, Howard Kurtz reports in his new blockbuster book: REALITY SHOW: INSIDE THE LAST GREAT TELEVISION NEWS RACE. Rather claims in his lawsuit against CBS that he wasn't involved in the final decision to run the Memogate story.

After finishing nearly two years of research, Kurtz unleashes his book this week.

Excerpt:

The night before the story was tentatively scheduled to air, Rather was sitting at the anchor desk, with less than half an hour before the start of the Evening News. He called Josh Howard, who had recently been named as executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday, and asked what they were doing to promote his story.

“We’re not,” Howard said. “We haven’t gotten the lawyers to sign off. The script isn’t finished. We haven’t even talked to the White House. I’m not going to start promoting a story when we don’t know what we have.” That was not the answer Rather wanted to hear.

“Other people are chasing this story,” he said. “We’re going to lose our exclusive. We have to get our hooks into the story.”

When Howard again refused, Rather raised the stakes.

“I’m going to give one of the documents to The New York Times to run in Wednesday’s paper,” he said. “They’ll have to credit CBS News. That way we can put our stamp on it.”

“You can’t do that either,” Howard said. “We haven’t finished vetting this.” Rather grumbled and hung up. To raise the specter of giving away a scoop to a competing news outlet was practically unheard of.

Howard, who had once been an Evening News producer, had never been subjected to this kind of pressure. He did, however, have a backup plan. They were still in rerun season, so if the Guard story failed to get the green light, he had a previously aired program ready to go.

CBS' "Requested Resignation" Strategy Backfires

2007-09-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

This is a Repost of a Feb 15 2005 entry:
***

CBS' "Requested Resignation" Strategy Backfires

How great if the senior insiders at CBS News begin lawsuits (and discovery) against CBS alleging that the Thornburgh Report was a gamed whitewash? What sweet angel deigned us worthy of this gift? All those manipulations under the "attorney client privilege" will get tested.

nb: The reason that interviews were memorialized with only handwritten notes (and not recordings)? Simple. A lawyer's handwritten notes are almost impossible to subpoena. The notes are protected by 2 privileges - the "work product privilege" (for which the client and the attorney's permission are typically required for disclosure) and the "attorney client privilege" (for which only the client's permission to disclose is required.)

The theory is that an attorney's subjective interpretations in deciding what notes to write, what to emphasis, etc., are so intertwined with any factual data included in the notes, that the protected "work product" of the attorney in making the notes cannot be unscrambled from any raw data that might otherwise be subject to subpoena/disclosure. In other words, the notes are deemed to be a strategic playbook, not a factual transcript, and the "other side" isn't entitled to view the strategic playbook of the attorney.

This typically renders the handwritten notes as "undiscoverable," as being inherently "attorney work product," and thus privileged from discovery and disclosure. (A nuance is that, even if CBS waives thework product privilege, Thornburgh's law firm may be able to refuse to turn over the notes, as some states have found that the attorney is a "co-holder of the privilege" and thus the attorney must consent to any turn-over. Compare this to reporter's who refuse to divulge a source, as being "bad for the reporter's reputation.")

Further, because the attorney's notes become integral to giving advice to the client, the "attorney-client privilege" typically applies to such notes.

Thus, contrast the attorney notes with a tape recording, which is much closer to pure evidence and thus easier to obtain via subpoena over "privilege" objections.

None of this is coincidence. Remember, Thornburgh's law firm is "expert" in preventing the raw data of their investigation from being released to third parties. As I've previously written:

Former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh is an attorney with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart ("K&L"). K&L has a practice specialty involving "internal investigations."

K&L's primary objective in the investigation is "to prevent criminal charges from being filed" against CBS..... K&L's second objective is to ensure that CBS and its executives are "acquitted of any charges."

To prevent indictment and assure an acquittal of CBS, K&L's expertise is to conduct the investigation "to maximize the ability to assert attorney-client and work product privileges over the materials compiled in any subsequent criminal or civil proceeding."

Rather's Mouthfoam

2007-09-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

The good news is that all of the dirty laundry that was swept under the rug, will now become public record via discovery. This should be fun.

Dan Rather Files Lawsuit Against CBS

NEW YORK (AP) - Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit Wednesday against CBS, alleging that the network made him a "scapegoat" for a discredited story about President Bush's National Guard service.

The 75-year-old Rather, whose final months were clouded by controversy over the report, says the complaint stems from "CBS' intentional mishandling" of the aftermath of the story.

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, also names CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves, Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone, and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

Rather is seeking $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

Some Parts Work Real Good. Some Don't.

2007-08-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

Of course Bummer dated her (well, ones like her) in high school.

Theater, Next Coupla Years

2007-07-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

Y'know, the 'Pubs have been in power for a long time. More or less since 1994. The 'Dems took control of Congress in 2006.

Remember the "Contract with America" and the first 100 days of the 'Pubs. Juxtapose that vs. the record of the Dems the past 9 months.

In any event, 'Pubs have forgotten so many of their subversive skills. The 'Pubs got fat, corrupt and ineffective during the recent hegemony.

I look forward to a little energized 'Publican polemic. Damned good show...

Cheney Subpeonas Kennedy Aides to Reveal Anti-War Plans of Senate Dems

2007-07-09T09:07:00.000-07:00

Of course, the title is make-believe. Cannot happen under our our separation of powers government.

But for the leftists at the AP afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome, reversing the absurdity 0f the title of this post nonetheless still means: Bush is Evil! Bush Thwarts Congress.

Here is the AP slant:

Bush denies Congress access to aides

President Bush invoked executive privilege Monday to deny requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides about the firings of federal prosecutors. The White House, however, did offer again to make former counsel Harriet Miers and one-time political director Sara Taylor available for private, off-the-record interviews.

In a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary panels, White House counsel Fred Fielding insisted that Bush was acting in good faith and refused lawmakers' demand that the president explain the basis for invoking the privilege. "You may be assured that the president's assertion here comports with prior practices in similar contexts, and that it has been appropriately documented," the letter said.

Property of Jolene

2007-06-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

Jolene must be one special gal, at least to this fella :

86% Disapproval of Congress

2007-06-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

Wow.

Just 14% of Americans have confidence in Congress. An All-Time Low. The last time Congress was near this unpopular was 1991-1994, where the approval rating was just below 20%.

The Republicans, with their Contract with America, picked up 55 seats in the 1994 election.

Causal connection?

IslamoFascist Kill Ratio

2007-06-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, when the Afghanistan war was beginning, I was speaking with an anti-war leftie colleague. He was citing all kinds of irrelvant non-data as to why the U.S. should not be engaging in the Afghan war. (You can imagine his opinion when the Iraq War came along.)

I disagree with this guy 95% of the time. He is central-casting West Los Angeles liberal aka socialist who lives in a Beverly Hills mansion.

In the half dozen years that I've known this fellow, through all the discussions, I've only witnessed him flip his lid, once. That was when I mentionned "kill ratios." Matter-of-factly, more or less citing the "terrible arithmetic of war," I indicated that for every U.S. casualty, in Iraq there would be not be a matching terrorist casualty, but rather perhaps 25 to 100 terrorist casualties. (My guess is that it was 200 or even 300 to 1, during the invasion and fall of Baghdad.)

Leftie socialists come unglued on the "kill ratio" point.

So to that end -- get the lefties foaming at the mouth -- here is an informative website with some Iraqi kill ratio information. You may like it, you may hate it, but ... it is the terrible arithmetic of war.

From the initial days where the ratio was likely in the 100's-to-1, it is now much closer. Regretably, the terrorists' use of IED's has definitely closed the otherwise 20-t0-30 fold differential in kill ratio.

A Preacher Speaks of War and the Like

2007-06-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

"There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war."

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

A Good Man, RIP

2007-06-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

Representative Wiley Mayne (R-IA) has died.

Loyal, but not blind.

3 dozen years after the fact, he remains a cairn as to how to conduct oneself. He stood by his constitutional mandate and voted against articles of impeachment against Nixon. Shortly thereafter, when new evidence came in, he announced that he would vote for impeachment, Nixon resigned.

"He would have been a 30-year congressman if it wouldn't have been for Watergate," said U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. "He was a great man, a great politician."

Loyal, but not blind. The world needed, and needs, people of character like Wiley.

RIP.

Midway

2007-06-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

15 Minutes Changed the World: The Battle of Midway, June 4-6, 1942

The first week of June is crammed full of historic military anniversaries. We commemorate the Allied D-Day assault against the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. The Israeli-Arab 6-Day War began on June 5, 1967. Israeli jet pilots destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor on June 7, 1981. The Marshall Plan was introduced as a Cold War defense, on June 5, 1947.

Yet a US Navy battle this same week, just 6 months after Pearl Harbor and a full 2 years before D-Day, goes largely unnoticed, lost down the memory hole; yet it certainly represents "the greatest naval victory in history” and perhaps the pivotal event in world military history since the Battle of Little Round Top at Gettysburg in July 1863.

It is the Battle of Midway, which, like Gettysburg, occurred over a three-day period, June 4-6, 1942.

The Background.

The Japanese WWII strategy was to destroy the U.S. Navy quickly, parallel with the successful tactics of the German infantry blitzkriegs in Europe. The December 1941 surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed or damaged 8 American battleships - then the core of US Naval groups.

Pearl Harbor was the first attack. The Battle of Midway, just 6 months later, was to be Japan’s coup de grace against the US.

New warfare paradigms had shattered the Old Guard military structure that had existed more-or-less since medieval times. Germany coupled a new military strategy – the Blitzkrieg -- with an advanced new weapon – the Panzer tank brigade. The result was that German armies over-ran countries in mere days or weeks.

Similarly, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was an equally revolutionary development, a precursor to intercontinental missiles. Japan had built a dozen aircraft carriers, and with them the Zero fighter, vastly superior to any fighter plane in the world. This combination, along with highly-trained pilots, resulted in Japan having mobile military airfields which could roam the oceans and attack unannounced from a hundred miles beyond the horizon. In an age before advanced radar, these carriers could launch the equivalent of one-sided, un-announced intercontinental missile attacks.

At the outset of WWII, the Japanese Navy was vastly more powerful than the US Navy. The US had only 6 aircraft carriers worldwide, of various classes, compared to Japan's 10 carriers (with 3 more emerging from Imperial shipyards in the ensuing weeks). In addition, Japan's naval fighter plane, the Zero fighter, was in a class of its own, and it was flown by a large, well-trained pilot corps.

Even more stunning, after the devastation of the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese superiority in battleships was 11-to-0.

In short, Japan had an overwhelmingly strong navy – so strong as to be practically invincible.

The Japanese Plan - Surprise Attack.

The Japanese Midway strategy was two-fold: To take over the U.S.-controlled island of Midway, which would deny the U.S. the ability to stage any operations in the Western Pacific; and, to destroy the remaining US Pacific Fleet. Without the US Navy to defend the West Coast, or to stop Japan’s empire building in the far east, Japan intended Midway to be the decisive, take-out blow against the US.

A small Japanese carrier group first launched an attack on Alaska, intended to draw the U.S. Fleet out of Pearl. Then, a second and much larger Japanese carrier group would attack Midway Island. A third Japanese group was stationed a few hundred miles back in reserve, to be brought forward to overwhelm and annihilate what remained of the U.S. Fleet after the Pearl Harbor. The three huge Japanese armadas would crush the divided U.S. Navy as it split one group towards Alaska and the other towards Midway.

Off the western horizon of Midway, out of sight of the US Midway scout planes, Japan had amassed an overwhelming carrier and battleship attack force, laying in wait to surprise and destroy the US forces. The combined Japanese Alaskan and Midway forces, including those in support role, involved 200 ships, including 8 carriers, 11 battleships, 22 cruisers, 65 destroyers, 21 submarines and approximately 700 aircraft.

The US Naval, devastated by two decades of military decommission and the attack at Pearl Harbor 6 months earlier, were a fraction of the Japanese armada.

Had the Japanese achieved their objective of a quick knock-out of the US Pacific Fleet at Midway, the US West Coast would have been defenseless against the Japanese Navy just 6 months after Pearl Harbor. A crash shipbuilding program in the US was months and years away from producing battleships or carriers. It is entirely possible – and the subject of much Monday morning quarterbacking by military thinkers – that threatened or actual Japanese naval attacks on the US West Coast in 1942 would have caused the US to agree to a ceasefire with Japan. It could have also forced the U.S. to divert its Navy away from Europe, thereby allowing Germany and its U-Boats to prevail over England and prolong, and even win, the war. (See Epilogue, below.)

"Midway was far more than a decisive naval victory. It was far more than the turning of the tide in the Pacific war. In a strategic sense, Midway represents one of the turning points of world history -- and in that role it remains under-appreciated."

----James R. Schlesinger, former US Secretary of Defense

The Surprise US Counter-Attack.

But unknown to the Japanese, their military codes had been broken by the US codebreakers just weeks before the Midway attack. With solid warning that the Japanese were amassing their forces for a surprise assault on Midway and any US Naval ships that came to Midway’s defense, the US did not split its fleet, nor hold any ships in reserve. Rather, the U.S. gambled and sent all three American carriers - the entire US carrier fleet in the Pacific - to lay in wait for the Japanese flotilla at Midway. In short, it was a surprise counterattack on a surprise attack.

The Battle.

As the Japanese launched their attack on Midway Island, they had no idea that the US carrier forces lay off the horizon a couple hundred miles to the east. On June 4, 1942, four Japanese aircraft carriers launched a strike with over 100 combat planes against the Naval Air Base at Midway. The US Midway base and its airplanes were damaged, but not completely destroyed.

As the Japanese attacked Midway Island, squadrons of US torpedo planes from the USS Hornet, the USS Enterprise and the USS Yorktown, launched their surprise counter-attacks on the Japanese carrier fleet.

The US torpedo bombers came in "low and slow" over the water to drop their torpedoes. One by one, they were blown from the sky by the superior Japanese Zero fighters. Not a single US torpedo bomber scored a hit on the 4 Japanese carriers.

Almost every US pilot and crew was killed, including by Japanese patrols that pulled American fliers out of the water and executed them. Only 2 of 42 torpedo bomber squadrons survived.

But the men of those 40 doomed squadrons from the Hornet, Enterprise and Yorktown had not died in vain. The Japanese Zero fighter cover normally would have flown high above the Japanese carriers, forming a protective bubble. But in order to repel the torpedo bombers on their “low and slow” approach, many of the Zeros had been brought down to low altitude, all while the Japanese flotilla scrambled in evasive maneuvering.

The Japanese mistakenly believed that the doomed torpedo bombers from the Hornet, Enterprise and Yorktown had been launched from Midway Island. In response, the Japanese Admiral Nagumo decided to strike Midway again, and returning Japanese fighters were re-armed with bombs for the attack on Midway’s airfields.

But as the Japanese were re-arming their fighters, they received a delayed report from one of their scouting planes, warning of a sighting of a US carrier. Nagumo reversed himself, and ordered that his fighter planes be re-armed with torpedoes. Thus, the decks of the Japanese carriers – painted yellow, with a red sun signifying the Japanese imperial war regime - were strewn with bombs, torpedoes, fuel tanks and fuel lines.

Japan Wins the War …For 15 Minutes

A few moments after 10:00 a.m., June 4th, 1942, the Japanese Admiral Nagumo and his staff believed that they had just annihilated all of the U.S. air cover for Midway, and in addition, their massive armada including 4 aircraft carriers with vastly superior planes and pilots was ready to attack the just-sighted U.S. carrier. Admiral Nagumo believed that Japan was one launch away from annihilating the United States Navy. The War of the Pacific was about end in glorious victory for the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Yet, at this critical moment, the so-called "lost squadrons" of US planes from the USS Enterprise and USS Yorktown arrived at high altitude over the Japanese carrier group. Lt. Cmdr. Wade McCluskey’s USS Enterprise dive bomber group of 32 planes had failed earlier to locate the Japanese fleet, and rather than turn his fighters back to his carrier, he changed course to search out the Japanese ships. They were located by trailing a Japanese destroyer trying to catch up to its flotilla. As McClusky arrived, Commander Maxwell Leslie also arrived in formation high above the Japanese, with a 17-plane squandron of Yorktown dive bombers.

McCluskey’s and Maxwell's dive bombers came upon an extraordinary situation: Four sitting duck Japanese carriers, without their protective shield of Zero fighter planes, with scores if not hundreds of Japanese planes sitting on the carrier decks, strewn with ordnance, fuel and crew:

“If they’d looked up they coulda seen us, but they were too busy trying to destroy the torpedo planes that had gotten there first.”
----Wilbur Roberts, U.S. Dive Bomber

The Japanese carrier decks were painted yellow, with the empire’s huge “Rising Sun” red circle painted on the bow of each carrier. This was a further gift to the U.S. dive bombers --a red targeting ball on a yellow deck, set against a dark gray ocean:

“Here are the arrogant Japanese with their bright yellow decks with a meatball up on the bow.”
-----Lt. Richard Best, U.S. Dive Bomber

At 10:22 a.m., June 4, 1942, the U.S. dive bombers - armed with bombs, not torpedoes - attacked the Japanese carrier fleet from high altitude in classic dive-bomber style. The Japanese had only a few minutes to savor what they thought had been a victory over the United States; it all evaporated within 5 minutes, courtesy of the dive bombers.

There were 4 Japanese carriers at Midway. The U.S. dive bombers immediately scored hits on 2 of those carriers (the Akagi and the Kaga) by precision dropping the bombs onto the carriers' loaded decks. There was no Japanese fighter cover in place at higher altitude to repel the attacks. A couple of bombs from US dive bombers, aided by the re-fueling tanks, torpedoes and bombs stacked on the decks of the Japanese carriers, turned into an inferno. Akagi and Kaga were destroyed. Shortly thereafter, a dive bomber squadron from the USS Yorktown attacked and destroyed the third Japanese aircraft carrier, the Soryu. Notably, these Yorktown dive bombers attacked with only a dozen working bombs.

Later, a small squadron of dive bombers from the USS Enterprise attacked and burnt the fourth and last Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, but not before Hiryu was able to launch an attack that disabled the USS Yorktown.

All four Japanese carriers at Midway – the Akagi, the Kaga, the Soryu and the Hiryu, burned and sank to the bottom of the Pacific.

The ailing USS Yorktown was later sunk by a Japanese submarine while limping back to Pearl Harbor. Minor skirmishes between the retreating US and Japanese naval groups continued through June 6th.

The Result.

When various other skirmishes ended by June 6, Japan had lost 4 carriers, 332 aircraft, and hundreds of its best pilots and crew. The US had lost only one carrier, 144 planes and scores of pilots.

Japan had 9 aircraft carriers when Midway began. One day later, it had only 5.

The U.S. had only 3 carriers going into the Midway battle. After Midway, it effectively still had 3 carriers, as the USS Saratoga came out of dry-dock and replaced the sunken USS Yorktown.

Japan had planned to seize Midway, and emerge from the battle with a 9-0 carrier advantage, giving the mobile airfields and its Zero fighters free reign of the Pacific (including over Pearl Harbor and even the US West Coast). Instead, Midway remained in U.S. hands, and the overwhelming Japanese carrier dominance was reduced to a basic parity (5-3).

The Battle of Midway was nothing short of a rout of the vastly superior Japanese Navy.

With the US war shipyards already producing at full capacity, Japan had lost at Midway its one chance to defeat the US via an early take-out. Instead, it was a matter of time before the massive US industrial war machine would overwhelm the imperial militarized Japanese.

High Water Mark of the Japanese War Empire

10:15 a.m., June 4, 1942, turned out to be the height of the fascist Imperial Japanese Empire. Unscathed and convinced of victory over the US after destroying almost every U.S. torpedo bomber in the initial engagements of June 4th, Japan's war effectively became a lost cause by 10:30 a.m.

The US Navy - outnumbered in carriers, ships, technology, planes and pilots - had achieved the greatest naval victory in modern history.

The near total destruction of the first wave of U.S. pilots and crew on board the “low and slow” torpedo bombers was not in vain; it alone made possible the exact conditions that allowed 50 U.S. dive bombers to send the Japanese armada to the bottom of the ocean minutes later.

Epilogue and the Big Picture

Modern historians have trouble coming to grips with the nature of the fascist, racist Japanese Imperial armed forces. Japan’s immediate goals leading up to Pearl Harbor were regional domination. But what lay behind that, is never questioned: Historians ignore why the high echelons of the Japanese warlord establishment craved regional dominance. Instead, they focus on “rational” explanations, such as raw material procurement. As such, Western historians simply miss the point: The Japanese military was hell-bent on destroying any and all peoples on the earth who were not Japanese. (Anyone confused, should start with a quick tutorial of Japan’s genocide of 300,000 Nanking civilians in just one month.)

What if the Japan has wiped out the US Navy at Midway?

In 1942, Germany was about to topple Russia, England was on life support, fearing an invasion once Germany had finished off Russia. For a few brief minutes on June 4, Japan believed that it was about to send the remaining US Navy Pacific carrier fleet to the bottom of the ocean, leaving the West Coast (and the entire Pacific) completely open to the overwhelmingly powerful Japanese Navy.

- Might the US have abandoned its “Europe First” policy? Americans were still wary of European wars, and fear of Japan was high following Pearl Harbor.

- Might the US have diverted materiel to the Pacific, thereby curtailing critical supplies to Stalin and Churchill? Might Russia and/or England have thereafter fallen?

- Might Japan have begun directly attacking the US, to sue for surrender from a position of dominance? Doolittle’s Tokyo raids occurred 2 months prior to Midway… .

- MacArthur surrendered in the Philippines in 1942; with a Japanese Midway victory, might other vast American armies and navies suffered the same fate?

- Might Japan have then attacked Russia, as part of its Axis duties, thereby forcing Stalin to pull forces off of the battle with Germany, to defend far-off Siberia?

- Etc.

It is not enough to assert that Japan’s goals were regional domination, and that Japan would have been content to leave the US alone once Japan dominated Eastern Asia and the Pacific. Modern generations talk around the point, because it does not fit well with our modern world. But the Japanese mindset in WWII was conquest – and worse.

***

So during this early June, remember the Battle of Midway, its codebreakers, and the dozens of torpedo-bombers, dive-bombers and other crews of the U.S. Navy who changed the course of history

More at: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/midway/midway.htm

Leftist and Corporate Thugs Celebrate Senate Alien Amnesty

2007-05-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

After a group of (i) leftist and (ii) bought-and-paid-for Republican senators announced an immigration "deal," they celebrated.

Sometimes, a picture says it all:

It Has to Have A Limit....

2007-04-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

A number of things have happened which are suitable cairns for this last entry [at least for a while] by Bummer.

First, blogs are passe. Everyone wants video now. I'll figure that vid thing out sometime in the next few years, but since spare time is at a premium ... ne jugez pas votre respirent (comme les types principaux disent).

Second, the thuggery of the main stream media is now a staple, regulary covered in the alternative media. (I used to criticize O'Reilly for his apologetic coverage of Rather; now, tune in to his show and you'll see he's now become one of the B23!). Whatever limited purpose this blog served in serving up some exclusive legal analysis on the RatherGate and BergerGate affairs, etc., the alternative media now regularly covers the transgressions.

Third, that last post jumped the shark. Time to exit just as the banana shows its first brown spot.

Fourth, Bummer is unbelievably busy.

Fifth, Bummer is gettin' some now.

Sixth, Bummer will be back. Somewhere, someday. I hope the B23 recognize Bummer when he does his phoenician thing.

So you mind if I sign off with this ?

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. ...

-Bummer

Can't Help Myself

2007-03-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Court shows, dating shows and a possible new hosting gig for daytime talk queen Rosie O'Donnell are some of the new syndicated TV projects in the hopper, sources said.

O'Donnell, currently a co-host of "The View," might be looking to return to a solo slot, possibly at Telepictures -- the studio where her previous talker was produced. But her contract with ABC reportedly mandates that she must negotiate with the network's Walt Disney Co. parent before doing so.

Thugs Believe Immunity Should Top Congressional List

2007-02-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

NY Times Contributor Geoffrey Stone highlights the ugly truth about what the MSM has been pushing for in Congress:

NY Times
February 21, 2007

Half a Shield Is Better Than None

AS the new Democratic Congress moves ahead decisively on a panoply of issues, it should confront a particularly pressing one: freedom of the press. Congress should expeditiously enact a federal journalist-source privilege law, which would protect journalists from compelled disclosure of their sources’ confidential communications in the same way psychiatrists and lawyers are protected. Importantly, neither Congress nor the press should be unwilling to compromise when the alternative is to forgo such a privilege altogether.

A strong and effective journalist-source privilege is essential to a robust and independent press and to a well-functioning democratic society. It is in society’s interest to encourage those who possess information of significant public value to convey it to the public, but without a journalist-source privilege, such communication will often be chilled because sources fear retribution, embarrassment or just plain getting “involved.”

As we have seen over the past several years, particularly with the federal investigation of the leak of the identity of former C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, the absence of a journalist-source privilege leads to confusion, uncertainty and injustice. At the hands of unrestrained federal prosecutors, journalists have taken a serious battering.

There is nothing novel in the call for such a privilege. At present, 49 states and the District of Columbia recognize some version of it. The federal government is long overdue to enact such a privilege as well. This issue has often been before Congress, but Congress has consistently failed to act, in part because the press has stubbornly insisted that anything less than a perfect privilege is unacceptable. We must move forward. The press can no longer afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Of the jurisdictions that protect a journalist-source privilege, only 13 states and the District of Columbia do so absolutely, meaning that under no circumstances can the state override the journalist’s right to withhold privileged information. The advantage of the absolute privilege is that it provides clarity and certainty to sources, journalists, lawyers and courts. The disadvantage is that in some situations, it could deprive law enforcement of critical information.

In 36 other states, the journalist-source privilege is qualified, meaning that the government can require a journalist to reveal confidential information if the government can prove that it has exhausted alternative ways of obtaining the information and that the information is necessary to serve a compelling state interest.

So how would a qualified privilege work at the federal level? The issue most often arises over matters of national security. Suppose, for example, a journalist reports that she has been informed by a reliable source that an unidentified major building in New York City will be blown up by terrorists the following day. It would seem irresponsible, indeed insane, to allow the reporter to refuse to disclose the identity of the source. Certainly, the government has a compelling interest in forcing the reporter to reveal the name of the source so it can attempt to track him down and possibly prevent the attack.

The trouble is that even in this situation, the matter is not free from doubt. Without the protection of an absolute privilege, the source might not have been willing to disclose the information to the reporter in the first place. Public officials are certainly better off knowing that a threat exists, even if they do not know the identity of the source, than knowing nothing at all. Thus, breaching the privilege in even this seemingly compelling situation might in the long-run prove counterproductive to protecting national security.

Nonetheless, such situations are more hypothetical than real, and they should not determine the shape of the privilege we enact. If the press has to compromise by endorsing a law that would enable the government to pierce the privilege in order to address an imminent and grave threat to national security, it should do so. There is little gain in sacrificing the privilege altogether because of a struggle over an abstract principle that would govern situations that have never happened in American history and are unlikely to happen in the future. Politics is, as they say, the art of compromise.

A serious journalist-source privilege is imperative to the national interest. It should be high on the list of Congress’s priorities for 2007. And it should be held hostage neither to hypothetical nightmare scenarios nor to the press’s stubborn, if principled, insistence on more than it really needs.

Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime.”

Bummer Is Confused: McRumsfeld

2007-02-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

Bummer generally likes Don Rumsfeld. Maybe it was his direct manner of speaking.

Bummer generally likes John McCain. Years in a red torture prison, then a Republican senator, what's not to like?

So when candidate McCain says that Rumsfeld was "one of the worst" Secretaries of Defense in history, Bummer gets confused.

Maybe it's just McPolitix.

Slut-ebrities

2007-02-19T16:48:00.000-08:00

For those who have been away to Mars, the past year has seen "tabloid journalism" fall to new levels, both old media and new.

Tabloid journalism prettty much relies upon chronicling the ups and downs - mostly downs - of actresses and singers.

Several have reigned supreme the past year or so, more or less for their partying antics: Paris Hilton; Lindsay Lohan; Britney Spears; Anna Nicole Smith; and Nicole Ritchie.

Anna Nicole Smith is dead from drugs. Her son died of drugs a few months ago.

Britney Spears is having a drug binge and mental health breakdown as I write this.

Nicole Ritchie has been busted twice for drugs/alcohol, is facing jail and rehab, and may soon die of anorexia.

Lindsay Lohan is in rehab.

Paris Hilton has had 3 homemade porn videos surface, although that seems to have propelled her "career."

Wow.

The tabloids will have to find some more chicks who are hell-bent on destruction; the current groups seems to have all played out at the same time.

WAPO Nails Some Liars

2007-02-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

The sometimes-great MSM vehicle Washington Post sometimes still nails it, as demonstrated by this article which again points out that Joseph Wilson is a liar:

Trial in Error
If You're Going to Charge Scooter, Then What About These Guys?
By Victoria Toensing
Sunday, February 18, 2007; B01

Could someone please explain to me why Scooter Libby is the only person on trial in the Valerie Plame leak investigation?

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald charged Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff with perjury on the theory that Libby had a nefarious reason for lying to a grand jury about what he told reporters regarding CIA officer Plame: He was trying to cover up a White House conspiracy to retaliate against Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had infuriated Vice President Cheney by accusing the Bush administration of lying about intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Fitzgerald apparently concluded that a purported cover-up was sufficient motive for Libby to trim his recollections in a criminal way. So when Libby's testimony differed from that of others, it was Libby who got indicted.

There's a reason why responsible prosecutors don't bring perjury cases on mere "he said, he said" evidence. Without an underlying crime or tangible evidence of obstruction (think Martha Stewart trying to destroy phone logs), the trial becomes a mishmash of faulty memories in which witnesses can seem as guilty as the defendant. Any prosecutor knows that memories differ, even vividly, and each party can be convinced that his or her version is the truthful one.

If we accept Fitzgerald's low threshold for bringing a criminal case, then why stop at Libby? This investigation has enough questionable motives and shadowy half-truths and flawed recollections to fill a court docket for months. So here are my own personal bills of indictment:

* * *

THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES PATRICK J. FITZERALD with ignoring the fact that there was no basis for a criminal investigation from the day he was appointed, with handling some witnesses with kid gloves and banging on others with a mallet, with engaging in past contretemps with certain individuals that might have influenced his pursuit of their liberty, and with misleading the public in a news conference because . . . well, just because. To wit:

· On Dec. 30, 2003, the day Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel, he should have known (all he had to do was ask the CIA) that Plame was not covert, knowledge that should have stopped the investigation right there. The law prohibiting disclosure of a covert agent's identity requires that the person have a foreign assignment at the time or have had one within five years of the disclosure, that the government be taking affirmative steps to conceal the government relationship, and for the discloser to have actual knowledge of the covert status.

From FBI interviews conducted after Oct. 1, 2003, Fitzgerald also knew that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage had identified Plame as a CIA officer to columnist Robert D. Novak, who first published Plame's name on July 14, 2003.

· In January 2001, Libby was the lawyer for millionaire financier Marc Rich, whom President Bill Clinton pardoned shortly before leaving office. Fitzgerald, who was then an assistant U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York, and U.S. Attorney James Comey spearheaded the criminal investigation of that pardon. [Reason enough to punish Libby? - ed.]

· Fitzgerald jailed former New York Times reporter Judith Miller for almost 90 days for not providing evidence in a matter that involved no crime. Yet the two were engaged in another dispute: Fitzgerald wanted Miller's phone records, contending that by contacting an Islamic charity, she had alerted it to a government search the day before it happened.

· Fitzgerald granted immunity to former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer without ever asking what he would testify to; he permitted NBC News bureau chief Tim Russert to be interviewed in a law firm office with his lawyer present, while Novak was forced to testify before the grand jury without counsel present.

· Armitage, like Bush adviser Karl Rove, forgot one conversation with a reporter. Fitzgerald threatened Rove with prosecution; Armitage bragged that he didn't even need a lawyer.

· In violating prosecutorial ethics by discussing facts outside the indictment during his Oct. 28, 2005, news conference, Fitzgerald made one factual assertion that turned out to be flat wrong: Libby was not "the first official" to reveal Plame's identity.

* * *

THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES THE CIA for making a boilerplate criminal referral to cover its derrière.

The CIA is well aware of the requirements of the law protecting the identity of covert officers and agents. I know, because in 1982, as chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committee, I negotiated the terms of that legislation between the media and the intelligence community. Even if Plame's status were "classified"--Fitzgerald never introduced one piece of evidence to support such status -- no law would be violated.

There is no better evidence that the CIA was only covering its rear by requesting a Justice Department criminal investigation than the fact that it sent a boiler-plate referral regarding a classified leak and not one addressing the elements of a covert officer's disclosure.

* * *

THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES JOSEPH C. WILSON IV with misleading the public about how he was sent to Niger, about the thrust of his March 2003 oral report of that trip, and about his wife's CIA status, perhaps for the purpose of getting book and movie contracts.

· On July 6, 2003, Wilson appeared on "Meet the Press" hours after the New York Times published his op-ed "What I Didn't Find in Africa," which accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraq threat. The piece suggested that Wilson had been sent to Niger at the vice president's request to look into foreign intelligence reports of Iraqi efforts to obtain yellowcake uranium. Wilson told Andrea Mitchell, "The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip there." But Cheney said he had no knowledge of Wilson's trip and was never briefed on his oral report to the CIA.

· Wilson has claimed repeatedly -- including on MSNBC's "Countdown" on July 22, 2005 and at the National Press Club on Oct. 31, 2005 -- that he was sent to Niger because of his "specific skill set" and not because of his wife. But Senate intelligence committee documents indicate that Plame suggested his name for the trip, as did a State Department report and a CIA official who briefed the vice president's office.

· Although Wilson has repeatedly claimed that neither his trip nor his oral report was classified, the CIA sent documents about the trip marked "classified" to the vice president's office and to date has not released the essence of the oral report. A source later identified as Wilson claimed in a Washington Post article on June 12, 2003, that documents related to an alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal were forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." When Senate intelligence committee staff questioned that, as Wilson had never seen the documents, he responded that he may have "misspoken."

· Wilson has continually played coy about his wife's status. On July 16, 2003, David Corn wrote in the Nation: "Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security -- and break the law -- in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?" Corn acknowledged talking to Wilson but said that Wilson refused to talk about his wife. Yet Corn also published Wilson's rather unsubtle suggestion: "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career."

Plame was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years of the date of Novak's column.

* * *

THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES THE MEDIA with hypocrisy in asserting that criminal law was applicable to this "leak" and with misreporting facts to wage a political attack on an increasingly unpopular White House. To wit:

· Notwithstanding the fact that major newspapers have highfalutin', well-paid in-house and outside counsel who can find the disclosure law and even interpret it, the following publications called for a criminal investigation:

· The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the appointment of a special independent counsel "absolutely necessary" because the allegations "come perilously close to treason" -- even though treason is a constitutional crime requiring two witnesses and the levying of war against the United States.

· The Boston Globe wrote: "This is a case that clearly calls for the appointment of an independent counsel."

· The New York Times naively approved the investigation if it "focused on the White House, not on journalists." It later applauded Fitzgerald's appointment, declaring that he must be allowed "to use the full powers of a special counsel."

· The Washington Post refrained from expressing shock at a "leak." But The Post had contributed to the fray by reporting on Sept. 28, 2003, that "two White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife . . . to undercut Wilson's credibility." This article was the likely impetus for the other papers' editorials.

As recently as a week ago, the media were displaying their prejudice in this case. On "Meet the Press," journalists lamented that the Libby trial was revealing how government officials can use their relationships with reporters to plant stories that hurt their political enemies. Where was the voice at the table asking, "Didn't Wilson also use the media with his assertions in the New York Times and The Post?"

* * *

THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES ARI FLEISCHER because his testimony about conversations differs from reporters' testimony, just as Libby's does. To wit:

· The former White House press secretary testified before the grand jury and at the trial that he had revealed Plame's identity to two reporters -- John Dickerson, then of Time magazine, and NBC News's David Gregory. Dickerson denied it. Gregory won't comment.

· On cross-examination, Fleischer testified that it was "absolutely correct" that he did not tell The Post's Walter Pincus on July 12, 2003, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Pincus emphatically contradicted this, swearing that in the middle of a discussion, Fleischer "swerved off," asking, "Why do you keep writing about Joe Wilson and Joe Wilson's trip? Don't you know his wife worked for the CIA as an analyst for weapons of mass destruction and arranged for it?"

So indict Fleischer. He contradicted Pincus as materially as Libby contradicted Russert or Time's Matthew Cooper, the two witnesses who were the basis for the Libby indictment. Whoops! Can't do that. Fitzgerald gave Fleischer "pig in a poke" immunity. That's an old prosecutor's phrase meaning that Fitzgerald granted Fleischer immunity from prosecution without knowing what Fleischer would say. No problem -- indict Pincus. His testimony differed from Fleischer's and he didn't ask for immunity.

* * *

THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES RICHARD L. ARMITAGE with intentionally keeping silent about being the first person to reveal Plame's identity to reporters and with falsely telling the public that he did so at Fitzgerald's request because he did not want to be publicly embarrassed. To wit:

· Novak testified that Armitage told him on July 8, 2003, that it was Wilson's wife, "Valerie," who sent him on the Niger trip. Not until September 2006 did Armitage release Novak to reveal publicly that he had been the columnist's source.

· The Post's Bob Woodward testified that Armitage told him on June 13, 2003, rather colorfully: Wilson's "wife's a [expletive] analyst at the agency." When the FBI interviewed Armitage on Oct. 2, 2003, he apparently forgot about his taped interview with perhaps the most famous journalist of this generation. In November 2005 Armitage released Woodward from their confidentiality agreement -- but only to tell Fitzgerald, not the rest of us, how he had learned of Plame's identity.

· Armitage attributed his more than three years of silence to Fitzgerald's request that he not discuss the matter with anyone. But Fitzgerald was not appointed until Dec. 30, 2003, three months after Armitage now says he realized that he was Novak's source.

· Despite Armitage's claim as to why he kept silent, he yakked to his subordinate Marc Grossman about what he had said in his FBI interview -- conveniently, the night before Grossman's own FBI interview.

THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES THE U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT with abdicating its legal and professional responsibility by passing the investigation off to a special counsel out of personal pique and reasons of ambition.

· Both then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey not only had access to the law books but also the clout and clearances to demand that the CIA tell them whether Plame was covert.

· In the fall of 2003, Ashcroft, having learned that he would probably be replaced after the 2004 elections, had grown weary of taking flak for the president and threw the Libby investigation hot potato to Comey.

· In the fall of 2003, Comey, who hoped to replace Ashcroft as attorney general, in turn passed the hot potato to Fitzgerald, a former colleague and one of his best friends.

I rest my cases.

I Don't Care Like the MSM Hopes I Care

2007-02-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

Anna Nicole Smith.

She's dead. So what?

A carnival sideshow with no earthly gifts to offer, other than ...

well, what exactly? Sometimes she got made up to look hot? Yep, true.

Many others died the same day, and my guess is that at least half were far more interesting, with more to offer to the person next to them in the supermarket line, than her. Yet the MSM panders as if the Queen had died.

Maybe the MSM is on to something. Maybe she was a queen.

Bummer doesn't mean to speak ill of the dead; rather, the intent is to speak ill of the MSM.

OK this is a mean-spirited posting, perhaps.

Hottie Astronette Mugshot

2007-02-08T10:58:00.000-08:00

5 out of 5 Bummer male friends agree: This is a hot mugshot.

Yeah, yeah, say all the politically correct crap in public, but what did you really think when you saw this?

What Isn't To Be Done?

2007-02-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

--Global Warming? Crash programs needed in non-fossil fuel technology.

--Fast-rising fascist jihadist menace, gathering power and funded/fueled by mid-east oil spigots.

Hmmm. 2 huge problems, which may turn the world back to the Dark Ages. What to do?

Well, whatever the West does, just be SURE :

1. Don't take out the Iranian refineries, thereby bringing the jihadist Iranian regime to its knees.*
2. Don't do anything that might raise the price of oil, thereby causing non-carbon fuels to become far more attractive and thereby fostering a boom in clean-energy investment that might stem global warming in the long run.
3. Don't acknowledge the age-old truism that, when your enemies go to war against each other, you win; because to acknowledge that, would reveal that war in the middle east - particularly sectarian war - is good for the U.S. and the West.

____
* - See today's news about Iranian missiles able to hit American blockade warships. See the picture? Bummer spelled it out, here.

MSM Fraudulent Headline IV

2007-02-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

The AP story screams:

"U.S. military says copter down in Iraq"

OK. So, where is the military press conference, etc? Oops. There is none. Rather, in AP-speak, the whisper of an un-named leaker now qualifies as a bona fide "US Military" statement:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Sea Knight helicopter crashed Wednesday northwest of Baghdad, sending flames and black smoke into the sky, the fifth chopper lost in Iraq in just over two weeks. The U.S. military believes all seven people aboard a CH-46 helicopter that crashed in Iraq on Wednesday were killed, and indications are that it was not hit by hostile fire, a senior U.S. defense official said.

... The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way, said the helicopter went down between Baghdad and Fallujah and that the crash appeared to have been related to mechanical problems.

Yes, yes, AP, we'll just trust you.

MSM Echo Chamber Attack Headlines

2007-02-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

Both the LA Times and the NY Times have now scrubbed* their websites of their use of mirror-image anti-GOP lead headlines, but for the record, the national print editions of each paper today (February 6, 2007) carry the following front page, lead headlines:

Los Angeles Times:

"GOP Thwarts Debate On War In The Senate"

New York Times:

"G.O.P Senators Thwart Debate Over Iraq Policy"

_____
* - The websites have removed the twain use of the rare word "thwart," now each using more common wording. The LA Times resorts to slang:

NY Times:

"G.O.P. Senators Block Debate on Iraq Policy"

LA Times:

"GOP bats down resolution debate"

Genius Headline II

2007-02-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

The Left has been somewhat successful in labeling the global warming issue as a liberal vs. conservative issue. I don't think it is, but no doubt that the Left has a higher % of "pro-Kyoto Accord" support that the Right.

Perhaps this is because global warming has been based upon junk science for so long. The brains of Lefties cannot resist junk science. Mind you, now, the science is getting less junky, as there is more data available. Causation is still the question, although the coincidence of warming and atmospheric carbon levels are lock-step.

Lefties, of course, want to regulate industry. (Bummer is in favor, by the way, of radically reducing carbon emissions.) To date, the Leftie mantra has been, "Man is causing global warming. Man must stop the activities that cause global warming, in order to slow or stop global warming."

OK. Bummer is with 'ya....

But along comes the LA Times. Leftie, for certain, but the idiocy of the Left is evident in this page one, lead headline, which effectively announces that man's efforts to stop global warming will be ... futile?

U.N. says there's no stopping global warming
Report also says climate change is 'very likely' the result of human activities.

Watch the Leftist MSM now dance around the problem in the UN report, to wit: Climate change cannot be reversed.

Ouch. Starts to sound like the anti-global warming folks --"Man cannot change this warming cycle" - might be correct, albeit they got their math wrong.

So...Kyoto...good intention, but futile?

Genius AP Headlines

2007-02-01T10:23:00.000-08:00

I'm sure Taranto will pick this up later today in his Best of the Web, but I'll beat him to it:

Bush, Dems have different economic views

The levels of analysis.....can't, just can't....

Courtroom Drama: Joseph Wilson Liar Case

2007-01-31T08:50:00.000-08:00

Bummer is getting a kick out of reading the media reports about the Libby trial. Former NYTimes reporter Judith Miller testified yesterday; today, there will be a showdown: Will the judge allow the defendant to question Miller about her other sources?

The press loves immunity, and they are apoplectic over the idea that any brownshirt federal judge or prosecutor can come between a reporter and his/her "sources." Without absolute immunity (which means, no entity has power to police the relationship), argue the media lawyers, our free press will be permanently damaged in its ability to act as the 4th estate.

This is hyperbolic crap, as I've written about many times. In the instant case, the defandant's lawyer put it perfectly to the judge, in effect stating that reporters should be subject to the same rules as everyone else in society; a press card does not amount to immunity:

Mr. Libby's attorneys were adamant about asking Ms. Miller about other sources. Mr. Jeffress told the judge, "I think she's going to say she couldn't remember which is very important to her credibility."

Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of Mr. Libby’s lawyers, argued that Ms. Miller should be asked the questions so Mr. Libby could have an opportunity to impeach her credibility.
“This is nothing more than classic 101 impeachment,” Mr. Wells said. “I don’t think we have a First Amendment collision at this point.”

The specific factual issue upon which Miller was skewered yesterday, was that in earlier grand jury testimony, she did not mention a 2-hour meeting with Libby at a hotel. At this trial, she testified in detail about the meeting.

Classic defense tactic - and likely a direct constutional right of the defendant* - is to have the opportunity to impeach a witness in open court. Should the defendant be denied this 6th Amendment right, in deference to the 1st Amendment mandate of a free press**?

Thugs on trial. Love it.

___
* - The 6th Amendment provides: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."

** - The 1st Amendment provides: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Subliminal Ads

2007-01-26T09:24:00.000-08:00

I remember as a kid, reading the book about subliminal advertising, as if it were a porn magazine.

The tricks of the 60's and 70's seem so innocent now.

Cf., the task of creating an ad for Mystery Shoppers.

Citizen Non-Soldier To Remain Citizen

2007-01-24T11:12:00.000-08:00

Unable to overcome pervasive public distaste for his empty smugness, and knowing that his dishonorable discharge would again surface, John Kerry accepts his obvious fate and bows out of the '08 race.

nb: Looking back, Bush has blown it. Wartime popularity, and a massively popular issue (non-fossil-based fuel) could have made him untouchable. He blew it.

Similarly, Kerry blew it. When he ran, the war was unpopular and those "Gore issues" regarding the environment were there for the picking. Instead, people had a visceral dislike of Kerry. He blew it.

The Butterfly Joke

2007-01-20T19:53:00.000-08:00

I've spent several hours on this thing. Laugh, fools:

Following the downing of an airliner carrying a UN delegation, Heaven was already bursting at the seams. Only 5 places remained in Heaven for the 6 victims of the crash. One would be banished to Hell.

The 6 unfortunate UN diplomats at the Gates pled with St. Peter to be admitted, but it was just an ugly cacophony from the quarreling American, Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, Portuguese and German diplomats.

Finally, St. Peter had heard enough of the ruckus, just as a beautiful colored moth fluttered by. St. Peter shouted, "Enough of this noise!" Admiring the moth, he said, "I will admit only those five souls who exhibit their cultural superiority by the voicing of simple poetry about this most delicate creature of God."

So the American went first. "Your holiness, that creature is known to us as the gentle 'Butterfly.' " And as the words fell on St. Peter's ears, he smiled at the juxaposition of the soft nouns and hard consonants, weaving its sonic beauty.

The Portuguese followed, in a soft voice matched to the syllables he spoke: "Most holy Peter, the gentle flutter is that of the 'Borboleta' to my people." And St. Peter seemed to nod off in a five hundred year-old trance, as if he had visited the wharf of the great sailing ships on a spring day, nodding at the beauty of the image rendered by the language.

The Italian was next: "Mi papa, in Roma at the base of the Vatican ramparts, for centuries we have spoken of this most dainty creature as the 'Farfalla.' " And St. Peter began softly humming some Verde opera as he closed his eyes to the joy his ears heard.

The Frenchman was next, in a breathy whisper: "Most Honored Father, in ze fields outside of Paris, for two thousand years the children of the parish have chased this little bird with lacy fabric nets worthy of his Holiness, this gentle creature we call ze 'Papillon.' " St. Peter, now almost trance-like, smiled and nodded, "Oui, mon ami."

The Spaniard spoke next, in a faint confession: "Father, I can offer only this: 'Mariposa.' " And St. Peter, speechless, could only tremble at the beautiful sound.

"What, this damned Schmetterling is sending me to Hell?" demanded the German.

Baseball, George and Stuff

2007-01-13T17:44:00.000-08:00

Some guys just got inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame ... which reminds Bummer of 1980. Bummer had never seen a professional baseball game. Perchance, in August 1980, BummerDad took Bummer on a business trip to Kansas City.

BummerDad's group had a bloc of Kansas City Royals tickets. That week, the Kansas City Royals were playing an at-home 3-game stand against the Toronto Blue Jays. A slugger by the name of George Brett had been on a hot streak the weeks before. In the first two games of the match-up, Brett went 4-for-8, including 3 home runs.

Bummer's first professional baseball game was at the Royals Stadium in Kansas City, watching the 3rd game of that series, on August 17, 1980. That game, George Brett went 4-for-4, including one homer. At the end of the game, his batting average was .401. It rose to .407 a few weeks later before coming back down to earth in the high .390's.

Anyway, thank you, Mr. Brett. What an introduction to the game.

"It Sounds Uncommon Nonsense"

2007-01-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

The Mock Turtle said:

"I never heard it before, but it sounds uncommon nonsense."

Sorta like the plan to provide Social Security to illegals.:

An agreement the Bush administration reached with Mexico on Social Security benefits would allow illegal aliens granted amnesty in the future to claim credit for the time they worked illegally.
The deal was reached in 2004 but never released publicly because it hasn't been submitted to Congress. The TREA Senior Citizens League, a Social Security advocacy group, recently obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act, and said it confirms the group's worst fears.

The document is a jumble of definitions and legal language, but a spokesman for the group said what's important is what's not in the text: It does nothing to prevent undocumented aliens who later get legal status from receiving benefits for the time they worked illegally. And that comes as the Social Security system's finances are about to be put under greater strain by the retirement of baby boomers.

Forgive Bummer for this little stroll down the lane:

2008: Children under 18 are exempted and entitled to full benefits, regardless of status.
2009: The payments can be transferred to Mexico without the 35% backup withholding tax that everyone else pays.
2010: Famaily members have standing to seek the payments for deceased relatives.
2010: Class action suit on behalf of all illegals to get the payment.
2011: All illegals get Social Security, as it is ruled discriminatory to have welfare programs distinguish between legals and illegals.
2013: Social Security and Medicare announce that the programs will run out of money in 2018, instead of the previously predicted 2042.
2014: Cross-border transfers of SSN benefits to Mexico surpass $100 billion annually.
2015: The US declares that all SSN and Medicare payments shall be in scrip, rather than US dollars.
2015: Mexicans are exempted from the scrip rule. Mexicans then get paid in US dollars; US citizens get "scrip." Scrip trades on the world exchanges at 46% of a dollar.
2016: World markets abandon the US dollar based upon rampant inflation against the plummeting dollar.
2017: US citizens come to the sad conclusion -- long known to many -- that the Social Security and Medicare systems are bankrupt.
2018: Constitutional Conventions are called by many midwestern states, furious with the collapse. Coastal states and the US Congress take offense and passes stopgap measures, to no avail.
2019: The US agrees to merge its currency with 6 other countries, along with a unitary tax system.
2020: US retirees who paid into SSN and Medicare are now treated pari passu with Mexican peasants as far as doling out retirement benefits. The $125 per month stipend -- 1/50th of the benefit that had been forecast when the US worker paid into the system -- is paid in Mexiscrip, sorta like a bus token, redeemable like a coupon in long lines.
2021: etc.

2006 Idiot and Anti-Idiot

2007-01-04T13:18:00.000-08:00

LGF announces the recipients:

RIP: UFO Sightings. b. 1946, d. 2006

2007-01-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

Say goodbye to 60 years of post-war UFO sightings. The pop/cult phenomena has run its course. Done. Stick a fork in it.

Reaching its cynosure in 1977 with Spielberg "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," somewhat paralleling the nature of religious faith -- that is, "belief" where there is no proof -- the church continued into the digital age with runaway TV hit, The X-Files.

Skeptics longs knew (scratch that ... long suspected) that the very nature of UFO sightings -- always occurring away from urban areas, with little or no evidence to back the sighting other than the pleading "eyewitness" testimony of some person, which was always somewhat spottily reported, was the giveaway. As the world grew smaller and technology advanced, the law of random outcomes dictated that -- statistically -- a UFO craft would be verified by oh, say, a real photograph, or a landing, etc., given the hundreds and thousands of UFO sightings, visits and even abductions that purportedly were occurring.

Enter the twain phenomena of: (a) digital and cellphone cameras, and (b) YouTube.com.

The ubiquitous nature of cellphone and digital cameras makes for nary a situation where one is not at hand to record an event. Including a UFO sighting. As the world savvies-up, the obvious lack of a digital snapshot by an "eyewitness" (coupled with a society far more willing to acknowledge that many people get whacked on drugs and booze) belies the fakery.

That, coupled with the immediacy of YouTube and so many other sites, by which interesting and unusual video is immediately uploaded for worldwide viewing -- and debunking.

Query: If in 1977, the "Dick Tracy" digital world of 2006 were described to you, wouldn't you think that one of the most popular pictures/files being exchanges would be ... UFO pictures taken by the wallet-sized camera that every teenager carries? Of course you would.

And of course it doesn't happen, because UFOs don't exist.

In this undated photograph, a wide f-stop is used by teenaged boys making a crank picture, to create a photo that makes far away objects as well as near ones both appear in focus. A circular Frisbee-like ring is tossed across the photo frame, near to the photographer and high in the viewfinder. Despite its obvious staging, this and thousands like it were considered "evidence" to a large group of enthusiasts, of alien civilizations making clandestine visits to the Earth. Stories also tended to make girls scared, and thus with a little alcohol, they could be hit upon. These UFO enthusiasts also tended to strongly consider the breakfast cereal known as "Cocoa Puffs" to be health food. Other than the grunion time of late-night a.m. talk radio, when these enthusiasts are at work as security guards and have time to call d.j.'s who encourage speculation as to the veracity of such photos as a way of selling ears to advertisers, the UFO enthusiasts saw a massive reduction in their population in the year 2006.

NYTimes and the RatherGate-esque Fake Abortion Yarn

2006-12-31T10:03:00.000-08:00

This is probably as good of a year-end post as any, to adhere to the original purpose of this blog. Pretty much anything that can be said about abortion, has been said. Bummer probably sits to the left of most of the B23 when it comes to this issue, but Bummer is known to ask his pro-choice pals about the tens of millions of abortions performed in the U.S. since the Roe case. Most data suggests that around 1.3 million abortions are performed each year in the U.S. One source indicates that about 13,000 women have abortions each year following rape or incest - that is, ~1% of abortions.

Regardless of one's personal opinion of abortion, it is a bedrock issue for the Left. Ascertaining "why?" is interesting, but not the point of this post. Knowing its audience, with so many of the Left being of the Sunday morning NYTimes habit,* the NYTimes needs to pander to its Sunday morning audience.

And pander it did. An April article about the illegality of abortion in many parts of the world, uses as its poster girl a woman serving a 30-year sentence of having an abortion.

Except ... it's not true. The story is fake, like the RatherGate TANG memos. She was sentenced for aggravated murder of a newborn. She killed her normally born (i.e., brought to full term, presumably 3rd treimester) infant, and then backdated the killing date to claim it had occured months earlier as an abortion, and not a strangulation after giving birth.

The NYTimes didn't bother to fact-check this critical keystone of the story.

Today, to ring out 2006, 2/3 of a year after the fact, the NYTimes runs an almost RatherGate-esque admission that its abortion story was fabricated. Well, the actual word "fabricated" isn't used. Lots of politically correct synonyms are used, as with the RatherGate report.

Fakery is fakery. Read for yourself:

December 31, 2006
The Public Editor
Truth, Justice, Abortion and the Times Magazine
By BYRON CALAME

THE cover story on abortion in El Salvador in The New York Times Magazine on April 9 contained prominent references to an attention-grabbing fact. “A few” women, the first paragraph indicated, were serving 30-year jail terms for having had abortions. That reference included a young woman named Carmen Climaco. The article concluded with a dramatic account of how Ms. Climaco received the sentence after her pregnancy had been aborted after 18 weeks.

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.” A three-judge panel found her guilty of “aggravated homicide,” a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel’s findings and ruling, the article’s author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the “truth” was different.

The issues surrounding the article raise two points worth noting, both beyond another reminder to double-check information that seems especially striking. Articles on topics as sensitive as abortion need an extra level of diligence and scrutiny — “bulletproofing,” in newsroom jargon. And this case illustrates how important it is for top editors to carefully assess the complaints they receive. A response drafted by top editors for the use of the office of the publisher in replying to complaints about the Hitt story asserted that there was “no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported.”

Apart from the flawed example of Ms. Climaco, Mr. Hitt’s 7,800-word cover article provided a broad and intriguing look at a nation where the penal code allows prison sentences for a woman who has an abortion, the provider of the procedure or anyone who assisted. His interviews with doctors, nurses, police officers, prosecutors, judges and both opponents and advocates of abortion offered revealing personal perspectives on the effects of the criminalization of the procedure.

Complaints about the article began arriving at the paper after an anti-abortion Web site, LifeSiteNews.com, reported on Nov. 27 that the court had found that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy ended with a full-term live birth. The headline: “New York Times Caught in Abortion-Promoting Whopper — Infanticide Portrayed as Abortion.” Seizing on the misleading presentation of the article’s only example of a 30-year jail sentence for an abortion, the site urged viewers to complain to the publisher and the president of The Times. A few came to me.

The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are “normally” reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel’s decision.

Mr. Hitt said Ms. Climaco had been brought to his attention by the magistrate who decided four years ago that the case warranted a trial, so he had asked the magistrate for the court record. “When she told me that the case had been archived, I accepted that to mean that I would have to rely upon the judge who had been directly involved in the case and who heard the evidence” in the trial stage of the judicial process, Mr. Hitt wrote in an e-mail to me. So he didn’t pursue the document.

But obtaining the public document isn’t difficult. At my request, a stringer for The Times in El Salvador walked into the court building without making any prior arrangements a few days ago, and minutes later had an official copy of the court ruling. It proved to be the same document as the one disseminated by LifeSiteNews.com, which had been translated into English in early December by a translator retained by The Times Magazine’s editors. I’ve since had the stringer review the translation of key paragraphs for me.

The magistrate, Mr. Hitt noted, “had been helpful in other areas of the story and quite open.” So when she recalled one doctor’s estimate that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had been aborted at 18 weeks, he used that in the article. (The only 18-week estimate mentioned in the court ruling came from a doctor who hadn’t seen any fetus and whose deductions from the size of the uterus 17 hours after the birth were found by the three judges to be flawed.)

Mr. Hitt concluded the article with this summation of the Climaco case: “The truth was certainly — well, not in the ’middle’ so much as somewhere else entirely. Somewhere like this: She’d had a clandestine abortion at 18 weeks, not all that different from D.C.’s [another woman cited earlier in the story], something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.”

The caption under Ms. Climaco’s picture was notably specific. It stated flatly that she “was given 30 years for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.”

When Times Magazine editors provided me with an English-language version of the court findings on Dec. 8, just after the translation had been completed, there was little ambiguity in the court’s findings. “We have an already-formed and independent life here,” the court said. “Therefore we are not dealing with an abortion here, as the defense has attempted to claim in the present case.”

The physician who had performed the autopsy on the “recently born” testified that it represented a “full-term” birth, which he defined as a pregnancy with a duration of “between 38 and 42 weeks,” the ruling noted. In adopting those conclusions, the court said of another autopsy finding: “Given that the lungs floated when submerged in water, also indicating that the recently-born was breathing at birth, this confirms that we are dealing with an independent life.”

Exceptional care must be taken in the reporting process on sensitive articles such as this one to avoid the slightest perception of bias. Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn’t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries “to some degree.”

Ipas used The Times’s account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for “identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization “continue critical advocacy work” across Central America. “A gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,” states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14. An Ipas spokeswoman called the appeal “moderately successful.”

The magazine’s failure to check the court ruling was then compounded for me by the handling of reader complaints about the issue. The initial complaints triggered a public defense of the article by two assistant managing editors before the court ruling had even been translated into English or Mr. Hitt had finished checking various sources in El Salvador. After being queried by the office of the publisher about a possible error, Craig Whitney, who is also the paper’s standards editor, drafted a response that was approved by Gerald Marzorati, who is also the editor of the magazine. It was forwarded on Dec. 1 to the office of the publisher, which began sending it to complaining readers.

The response said that while the “fair and dispassionate” story noted Ms. Climaco’s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article “concluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.” The response ended by stating, “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.” [bwaa ha ha ha -- ed.]

After the English translation of the court ruling became available on Dec. 8, I asked Mr. Marzorati if he continued to have “no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts” in the article. His e-mail response seemed to ignore the ready availability of the court document containing the findings from the trial before the three-judge panel and its sentencing decision. He referred to it as the “third ruling,” since the trial is the third step in the judicial process.

The article was “as accurate as it could have been at the time it was written,” Mr. Marzorati wrote to me. “I also think that if the author and we editors knew of the contents of that third ruling, we would have qualified what we said about Ms. Climaco. Which is NOT to say that I simply accept the third ruling as ‘true’; El Salvador’s judicial system is terribly politicized.”

I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court’s findings to the attention of those readers who received the “no reason to doubt” response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor: “No, I’m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point.”

One thing is clear to me, at this point, about the key example of Carmen Climaco. Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.

_________________
* - The I love the NYTimes on a Sunday morning" identifier is singlewoman code for: I'm liberal, I don't go to church, and I like to wake up with my man on Sunday and nurse my hangover with coffee while reading the NYTimes...Bummer knows),

Saddam: Une photographie a la valeur de mille mots.

2006-12-30T07:58:00.000-08:00

'O Revs, Jackie.*

Le résultat est juste.

Update:

SADDAM’S HANGING
Video link here.

Several hours after Saddam Hussein was hanged this morning in Baghdad, the state-run television channel, Iraqia, began to run edited video, without sound, of the run-up to the hanging. The video shows Saddam being guided up the steps to the top of the gallows, a scarf being put around his neck and then the noose placed over his head and tightened on his neck. Then it stops. This footage, about a minute long, was played and replayed over and over during the day, and quickly found its way onto all major television stations around the world.
Later this evening, another video of the hanging popped up, this time being shown on Al-Jazeera and Arabiya, two Arabic TV channels based in the Gulf. The new video was of poor quality, was very jerky, and had clearly been shot on a cell phone or some similar device from below by one of the two dozen witnesses to the event. It also had sound. The picture it gave of Saddam’s last moments was very different from the edited, silent version that the Iraqi government had released earlier.
There are five men in black face masks who are visible on the gallows platform around Saddam, acting as guards. As they guide him towards the trap door and put the noose over his head, they start chanting religious slogans with the names of Moqtada al Sadr (the head of the Mahdi army, accused of organizing death squads against Sunnis) and Baqr al Sadr (the father-in-law of Moqtada). Saddam, a Sunni, is outraged at this last-minute provocation, and tells them to “go to hell.” This is generally where the two TV stations cut the video, but on at least one occasion that we saw, Arabiya allowed the video to keep rolling: The cell phone camera is jerked down to the ground, as if the person holding it had to conceal the camera, then it is slowly raised up to Saddam again, and suddenly his body shoots down through the trapdoor. At this, the Arabiya anchor came on and made a scissors symbol with two fingers with a mischievous grin on his face, as if to say that they really shouldn’t have shown that, but so be it. A cynical voyeuristic ploy, nudge nudge wink wink…
However, the impact of this video could be quite significant. First, it may reinforce Sunni suspicions that the execution of Saddam was merely an act of Shiite revenge for decades of repression under Saddam. The building where the execution took place was expressly chosen because it was once used as a detention center by a division of Saddam’s secret police that was focused on the Shiite Dawa party. Some of the witnesses whom the government invited to the execution had themselves once been tortured in that same building. Indeed, Prime Minister Maliki, who signed the execution order the day before the hanging, is a long-term member of the Dawa party and had himself been sentenced to death by Saddam back in 1980 before fleeing the country.
Worse, it may also reinforce the fears of Sunnis that Maliki’s government is beholden to the Mahdi army, Moqtada’s militia. Executions are generally expected to be solemn affairs –- certainly not opportunities for thugs to score some final sectarian points before the “enemy” is disposed of. The video itself seems quite distasteful –- but it is informative to the extent that it reveals the political baggage that the current government carries on its shoulders. It does not add up to a pretty picture.
December 30, 2006

A picture of Saddam Hussein being hanged, about to have the hanging, guillotine, execution, photo, killed, death sentence.
____
* - Au revoir, jackass.

They Said the Kid's Name, Vic !

2006-12-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times -- in the back pages, mind you -- continues the noble facade that the Palestinians warlords are really just "political parties," but breaks down and uses the heretofore forbidden phrase -- "civil war" :

Fatah, Hamas sign new truce
Chance of success for Palestinian rivals' pact is unclear.
December 20, 2006

GAZA CITY — The leaders of the two main Palestinian factions called for an end to fighting that killed six more people Tuesday and had Palestinians wondering whether their society was hurtling toward civil war.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, of the Fatah movement, and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of the Islamic militant group Hamas, signed a fresh cease-fire agreement aimed at stopping back-and-forth clashes.

It was not clear, however, whether the latest attempt to quell unrest would succeed, amid rising tension driven largely by Abbas' call for early elections that could undercut Hamas' upset victory in January's polls.

Under the agreement, both sides are to withdraw their forces from the streets, leaving only ordinary police officers to maintain law and order. The deal, brokered by Egyptian officials, was announced separately in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The accord capped a long day of violence that had left an earlier attempted cease-fire a shambles and had prompted the Education Ministry to close schools today.

Don't Say the Kid's Name, Vic!

2006-12-19T09:22:00.000-08:00

Whatever you do, MSM, don't say the name, "Palestinian Civil War!"

BBC News:

Schools shut amid Gaza 'anarchy' [But it ain't no civil war! - ed]

Hamas militants have been out in force patrolling Gaza City. Schools have been closed in Gaza amid what officials say is a state of anarchy caused by fighting between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah.

Violence has flared since Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday called for new elections, a move the Hamas-led government branded a "coup".

Mr Abbas has called for all factions to respect a truce agreed on Sunday.

In a statement, he called on "all, without exception, to adhere to a ceasefire and to end the killings and all other operations in order to maintain our national unity".

Don't Say the Kid's Name, Vic !

Pat Tosses a Dart

2006-12-19T07:54:00.000-08:00

Pat Buchanan is like a dart travelling though the air in a pub. Sometimes it hits bullseye, and sometimes it doesn't.

And, like the dart being tossed, not everyone is all comfy about the dart whipping though the air, because it might hit and pop their balloon. Or maybe stick 'em in the neck.

Bummer, indeed, thought that Iranian president Ahmandinejad was the top contender for Time's Man of the Year. Alas, in a redux of the 70's "Me Generation," Time has chosen "You" in the context of the Digital, everyone-has-15-minutes Age.

But Buchanan, like that dart, is not to be ignored:

Person of the Year: Ahmadinejad
by Pat Buchanan, December 19, 2006
Since 1927, the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis, Time has devoted its final cover of the year to the Man of the Year. The Lone Eagle was first. In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR was the Man of the Year three times. Stalin, Truman and Churchill made it twice, though the selection of Churchill in 1949 seems dubious, as he had been out of power four years, while Mao was seizing China by the throat in the bloodiest revolution of the century.

Hitler was chosen in the year of Anschluss and Munich, 1938. Gen. Marshall made it twice, as did Ike, in 1944 as victor of Normandy and, 15 years later, as president.

In the 1960s and 1970s, JFK made it once, LBJ and Nixon twice. Nixon's 1972 designation was shared with Henry Kissinger. In 1979, the dark and brooding face gracing Time's cover was that of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

And Time got it right. For Time's Man of the Year, now Person of the Year, is the figure who, for good or evil, dominates the news. Yet this year Time could not bring itself to name the obvious choice. Instead, it chose you and me, all of us citizens of the digital democracy who create on the Worldwide Web.
Why the copout?

Perhaps it was Ahmadinejad's hosting of a conference of Holocaust skeptics, including David Duke, that caused Time to recoil. Perhaps it was fear that the face of the Iranian president on the cover of Time would repel the American people and be death for sales.

...Richard Stengel, editor of Time, as much as concedes he could not bring himself to choose by the traditional standard, if that meant choosing Ahmadinejad: "It just felt to me a little off selecting him."

Understandably. But the refusal to select Ahmadinejad reveals an unwillingness to confront hard truths. For putting his face on Time's cover would have done a useful service, jolting America to a painful realization. Not only George Bush, but the United States, its Arab allies and Israel, had a dreadful year, as Iran emerged as first beneficiary of a war fought by this country at a cost of 25,000 dead and wounded.

What the choice of Ahmadinejad would have said is that Iran is in the ascendancy in the Middle East and it is not inconceivable that the United States is headed for defeat, not only in Iraq but Afghanistan.

The Taliban have come back. The Pakistanis have ceded them sanctuary. Some NATO nations are refusing to risk troops in combat. And it has been some time since guerrillas who enjoyed a privileged sanctuary in that part of the world failed to expel European soldiers perceived as imperial occupiers.

Islamists control Somalia.
Anti-Americanism is rampant in Lebanon....

Even Bush's defense secretary concedes we are not winning in Iraq. It may take a "surge" of 20,000 to 40,000 troops to stave off defeat before the end of Bush's term.
On the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas and Fatah appear on the brink of civil war....

Eighteen months ago, Ahmadinejad was the unknown mayor of Tehran. Today, he is the visible face of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, both a cause of and the personification of our failures. He has defied Bush's demand that he give up the enrichment of uranium, split the Security Council, mocked the Holocaust, called for the end of the Zionist state and the expulsion of America from the Mideast, terrified the Sunni monarchs, and uunited the Arab and Islamic masses behind his defiance.

His trip to the United Nations, where he ran circles around U.S. journalists, was a diplomatic triumph. And he has done it all not with military power – Iran would not last a week in an all-out war with the United States and has no defense against Israel's nuclear weapons – but with theatrics and rhetoric.

He inspires all who hate Israel and Bush's America. And, according to the Zogby polling yesterday, that is a majority which, in some once-friendly nations, is approaching near unanimity.

Ahmadinejad, a man of words without real power, is the big winner of 2006, because Bush, America and Israel were the big losers.

Why do a billion Muslims prefer Ahmadinejad to America? That is the question that needs to be addressed.

Ouch. That dart just hit me.

AP Has a Eureka! Moment

2006-12-18T22:07:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press runs a shocking headline with breaking, previously untold news:

North Korea wants U.N. sanctions lifted

Umm...thanks, AP. Good scoop. Thanks for the BimboText.

Terrorists Killing Terrorists = Good for U.S.

2006-12-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

Bummer's friends -- the Hollywood lefties, that is -- think he is a fascist imperialist. (Completely untrue, BTW.)

Because Bummer -- as the B23 have read over the past 2 years -- believes that a robust bloodletting in the Middle East is both (a) inevitable* and (b) good for the advancement of the forces of liberal democracy, worldwide.

So Bummer's friends will view today's news of a sort-of Casus Belli between Hamas and Fatah as confounding.

Not to Bummer, or those of the B23 who also see things for what they are. To wit:

Islamofascist groups turning their killing efforts against their fellow islamofascists is a categorically good thing.

That said, today's [good] news:

Hamas accuses Fatah of attack on premier

Hamas and Fatah-allied gunmen exchanged fire in Gaza City and Ramallah on Friday, fanning fears of widescale fighting between the rival Palestinian groups a day after gunmen shot at the entourage of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

The street battles in the Gaza Strip and West Bank came amid Hamas accusations that a powerful Fatah leader orchestrated the attack on Haniyeh. Leaders of both groups had warned in recent days that the spiraling violence threatened to bring the Palestinians to civil war.

The fighting cast a cloud over celebrations Friday to mark Hamas' 19th anniversary. However, the Islamic militant group pushed ahead with its rallies, and at least 60,000 people gathered at a stadium in Gaza City for a celebration Friday afternoon. Haniyeh was expected to make an address.

The fighting Friday in the normally peaceful city of Ramallah began when Hamas supporters marched toward the center of town, where Fatah-allied police were deployed in advance of the Hamas celebrations. A total of 32 people were wounded by stones and gunfire, including a man hit in head by crossfire, hospital officials said.

___
* - This is meant literally. It will happen, and the US cannot stop it. In fact, it has already begun. Differing theologies dictate whether one must intercede when one KNOWS such intercession will be futile. Perhaps such intercession is, then, just a charade, to score political points? Bummer agrees with the wisdom of the ages, codified in the jurisprudential axioms of the California Civil Code:

Section 3526. No man is responsible for that which no man can control.

Section 3528. The law respects form less than substance.

Section 3531. The law never requires impossibilities.

Section 3532. The law neither does nor requires idle acts.

Apocalypto Now

2006-12-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

Hollywood is bashing Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.

Below is a textbook hit job from the LA Times editorial page.

Funny how not a single critical critic mentions 3 gorillas sitting in the room:

1. Gibson is Catholic. Y'know, the religion that is based upon the premise that a guy "suffered and died" for man's sins. Y'know, that whole torture/crucifixion thing. Gosh, maybe there's something there......

2. Gibson believes that Christian ethics have, over the long term, been a civilizing factor for mankind. (You sorta have to take the loooong view on this.) That is best demonstrated by exhibiting the raw barbarism of the aboriginees who inhabited most of the world, untouched by Christianity.

3. In the past couple of years, we've seen festooned islamofascists make movies of bloody human sacrifice rites. Hint: GIBSON IS SHOWING LINKAGE.

I laugh at the MSM, more every day.

What's with Mel's bloody porn?
--Gory scenes of torture in "The Passion of the Christ" and "Apocalypto" tell us much about Gibson's sensibilities.
By Richard Schickel

December 13, 2006
MOVIES ARE, in their nature, violent. ....

That said, why is Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" so upsetting? ... the critical community has done its job, crying "Yuck" (in chorus) about this movie.

...It is not so much the detail with which [the movie] it treats violence that finally disgusts even the most hardened moviegoer; it is the ritualistic staging of it. ... He loves to get people painfully restrained and then do really bad things to them ...
... We are dealing with ritualized sadomasochism — an open manifestation of one of those dark fantasies that those in thrall to them must endlessly repeat and that have, of course, some sort of psychosexual component. That's why "Apocalypto" is so discomfiting.
I say his slavering interest in the torture of the innocent and the idealistic is a form of pornography. I wouldn't ban it. But, were it not for stern critical duty, I would shun it — because it is infantile. And because it tells me more than I want to know about the filmmaker's mind, spirit and unspoken fantasies.

BimboText and MSM Headlines

2006-12-12T10:08:00.000-08:00

It is possible that Bummer has lost his marbles. "Why, Bummer?" "Because this AP headline really got my craw."

North Korea might disarm with incentives

AP - "South Korea's nuclear envoy said Tuesday that North Korea could be persuaded to disarm with strong incentives to help reverse its economic crisis, while China called for flexibility at revived arms talks it is hosting. ...."

This headline, at every level, is a textbook example of the 'death by 1000 cuts' bias and stupidity of the MSM. I think Rush calls it, "drive-by media."

It isn't RatherGate, of course. But when a South Korean envoy - the first country on the invasion list of the bonkers North Korean South Park character president - says,

"Gosh," said the South Korean, "if America would just lavish several billion more dollars on this North Korean guy, maybe he'd stop all that scary talk about nukes 'n stuff,"

and the AP issues a worldwide bimbo headline that reads:

North Korea Might Disarm with Incentives

, it takes the cake.

Bummer is suggesting a new term to describe the MSM headlines: BimboText

Middle East: So What if It Explodes?

2006-12-09T08:19:00.000-08:00

Saudi King Abdullah opened the annual summit of Gulf leaders on Saturday with a warning that the Arab world was waiting to explode:

"Our Arab region is besieged by a number of dangers, as if it was a powder keg waiting for a spark to explode.... [M]ost dangerous for the [Palestinian] cause is the conflict among brethren... a brother is still killing his brother...we see dark clouds threatening the unity of the homeland, which risks sliding again into... conflict among the sons of the same country."

***

Bummer asks, quite earnestly:

"So what if the Middle East explodes?"

Downside for the U.S.

1. Risk of oil flow disruption. Damaging to US in the short term; what about mid-term and long-term?
2. Potential for expansion of anti-US islamofascism into unstable areas.
3. Likely attacks on Israel, with risk of US involvement resulting .
4. Etc.

Upside for the U.S.

1. US enemies -- "brothers" - begin fighting each other, instead of the US.
2. Regional chaos creates inefficiencies and vacuums which the US military can strategically exploit.
3. Increase in oil prices spurs US energy technology development, for which US has unparalleded advantage over the world.
4. However painful the oil price increase to the US, it is devastating to China.
5. Western stability and democracy will become more valued.
6. Islamofascist chaos will become less valued.
7. Islamofascist soldiers and leaders will be killed.
8. Israel can fight, unrestrained, against common targets.
9. Europe may no longer remain complacent about islamofascism, as the battle will spill into Europe.
10. Etc.

***

The Perle/Wolfowitz Plan was the basic strategy that inflated into the Iraq invasion. Short version: Establish a US -protected zone in Iraq (originally, the H3 airbase in western Iraq) which would serve (short-term) as base for pro-democracy movements, and (long-term) as the lighthouse for a despotic region (as Hong Kong was to China; as West Berlin was to East Berlin; as Italy was to Albania; etc.). Note to astute B23: This construct incorporates as a given, that there will be some level of armed conflict, to be waged not by US soldiers but by locals who oppose totalitarianism.

Bush admin came to the conclusion that that US zone could be be increased, in one felled swoop, to be the entire map of Iraq. Guys like Powell said, "No, too ambitious." Bush did it anyway, on the philosophy/theology that the locals would help out.

So if we're going to get all practical, let's get practical.

1. Maintaining Iraq as a single political unit was never a primary necessity of US policy, and it has become a huge burden. Abandon it. Armed conflict in connection therewith is inevitable.

2. Recognize that warm fuzzy dinner party talk with cheese-easting surrender monkey Euro-politicos does NOT necesarily equate to "in the US's interests." To wit: The US interests (short, medium and long-term) may be well-served by Middle East chaos and war. Europe may face much more immediate short-term perils therefrom, than the US.

***

On the whole, is the US better off, worse off, or about the same?

No clear answer, of course, but ... Bummer doesn't see the US clearly being "worse off," to which everyone seems to give lip service.

Angry Male Methodist Caught in Terror Planning

2006-12-08T18:19:00.000-08:00

An interesting terrorism story on the AP about an angry young male Methodist who, in the name of jihad, planned a Christmas bombing in Chicago:

CHICAGO - A Methodist convert who talked about his desire to wage jihad against civilians was charged Friday in a plot to set off hand grenades at a shopping mall at the height of the Christmas rush, authorities said.

Investigators said Derrick Shareef, 22, an American citizen from Rockford, was acting alone and never actually obtained any grenades. He was arrested Wednesday when he met with an undercover agent in a parking lot to trade a set of stereo speakers for four hand grenades and a gun, authorities said.

"He fixed on a day of December 22nd on Friday ... because it was the Friday before Christmas and thought that would be the highest concentration of shoppers that he could kill and injure," said Robert Grant, the agent in charge of the Chicago .

OK. You caught me. I altered one word of the story. Gotta wake up early to fool the B23.

Cold Warrior RIP

2006-12-08T08:25:00.000-08:00

Jean Kirkpatrick - R.I.P.

Sad to see the passing of another American Cold Warrior and Hero - Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Take a moment to review the so-called Kirkpatrick Doctrine. Non-democratic regimes can be focused inwardly (Totalitarians), or outwardly (Authoritarians). They pose different scenarios for the West.

Cf. Islamofascists -- Totalitarian, or Authoritarian?

Kirkpatrick's theories are as relevant today as ever.

NB: We won the Cold War. Pay attention to the playbook.

US Simian Commission Orders Out for Lunch

2006-12-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

"'Bonjourrrrr, you cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys!"

Bolton Leaves; MSM and Bush Fake It

2006-12-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

Y'know, maybe the 'Dems are on to something. Maybe Bush really has lost his way and should be impeached. Pull the artificial life support. This kind of crap is not helpful. Bush can re-appoint Bolton to another term, without Senate approval.

Bush is unbelievable lame.

Bush accepts Bolton's U.N. resignation

Unable to win Senate confirmation, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton will step down when his temporary appointment expires within weeks, the White House said Monday.

Bolton's nomination has languished in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a year, blocked by Democrats and several Republicans.

Bush gave Bolton the job temporarily in August 2005, while Congress was in recess. Under that process, the appointment expires when Congress formally adjourns, no later than early January.

The White House resubmitted Bolton's nomination last month. But with Democrats capturing control of the next Congress, his chances of winning confirmation appeared slight. The incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, said he saw "no point in considering Mr. Bolton's nomination again."

While Bush could not give Bolton another recess appointment [WRONG] the White House was believed to be exploring other ways of keeping him in the job, perhaps by giving him a title other than ambassador.

What crap. The MSM and Bush are spinning this, pretending that Bush legally needs Senate approval to re-up Bolton. He doesn't. Article II, Section 2 states:

"The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session."

Even the Senate opines that it can be ignored by recess appointments. See, e.g., here. Successive recess appointments are perfectly allowable.

Iraq Rx: What Would Bummer Do?

2006-11-29T06:45:00.000-08:00

Update: The leaked Rumsfeld memo (don't get me started as to why that is somehow "OK") seems to be compatible with Bummer's Rx. Oops, gotta run, the red "Langley" phone is ringing....)

1. As pointed out here at S&C, since invasion time, a post-war unified Iraq was a "Nice if you can get it" item, but it was not central to the Wolfowitz Plan.

2. The existence of a viable, democratic zone in and about the Iraq theatre, protected by the US military for the long haul, is central to the Wolfowitz Plan.

3. Bummer's Rx: The US should pick several areas in Iraq for the establishment of large US-protected zones. Preferably, these zone(s) would have the following features:

a. Remote from centers of sectarian war. That is, not Baghdad.
b. Suitable for long-term demographic growth.
c. Tactically situated for military and civilian flight operations.
d. Specifically selected for total control of the ingress/egress. That is, behind the walls, sits all that the West has to offer. Safety, prosperity, life/liberty/pursuit, etc. No spoilers or suicide bombers are allowed through the gates.
e. Let these towns grow over the next few decades. They become the cairn - the lighthouse - for a region in chaos. Like Western Europe as the beacon to those behind the Iron Curtain, the lighthouse refutes (over a generation or two) the Big Lie(s) propagated by despotic regimes.

4. Perhaps one in Kurdland (they'd like it), several in the western desert and southern deserts- i.e., at H3 - and, the most tricky, one or two in the south (at the Gulf) and east (bordering Iran).

5. Keep the troops deployed in Iraq for another year or so (or less, if appropriate), until these stronghold bases are established. Then, withdraw into the bases. Iraq will further slip into chaos. So be it:

There are two strategically satisfactory outcomes in Iraq that are so politically incorrect that they cannot even be hinted at in public, but they may get fleshed now as pragmatism seeps into the debate. The first non-PC yet satisfactory outcome centers around the reality that, A Unified Iraq Is Not a Primary Goal:

"So if we’re going to get all practical, let’s be practical. A unified Iraq is a four-run homer, accelerating the Mideast peace process by years. But a one-run homer is all we need, and perhaps all we can afford. To wit: A balkanized Iraq with two working democratic zones, territories or countries (Kurdistan; Shia’stan) satisfies the basic strategic objectives of the [Wolfowitz] Plan."

The second non-PC yet satisfactory outcome recognizes this: Regional Mideast civil wars, involving democracy movements, are an improvement over the status quo and a likely step in the generational struggle that awaits the Mideast. (Hey, the US, European, Central and South American democracy movements were all marked by generations of rebellion and civil war; why should we somehow expect the Mideast be exempt?)

Of course, Bush didn't detail the ugly realities of war in his casus belli - no Western leader ever does. Roosevelt didn't; Lincoln didn't; Churchill didn't.

******

S. Ct. Rejects Thug's Immunity Claim

2006-11-28T08:21:00.000-08:00

Spot the differences among A, B and C:

A. A lookout calls his drug factory accomplices and warns them to start flushing the evidence, as the police are 4 blocks away.

B. An enemy agent obtains secret invasion plans from a traitor, and reveals the plans to an enemy general, just in time for the enemy to move its troops.

C. A person who knows of a secret, classified impending police raid on an Islamic terror money laundering cell, calls that target and asks if the target would like to "comment" upon the impending raid.

Yep. You got it. Same same.

Which is why the Supreme Court - again - lets it be known that no one is above the law. The First Amendment is not a blank check immunity card.

And, the elite thugs of the legacy press, are NOT happy about losing. Again.

Justices reject N.Y. Times in leak case

U.S. prosecutors can now review reporters' phone records.
Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2006

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused Monday to shield the New York Times and two of its reporters from a prosecutor's probe into who leaked word of planned raids on two Muslim charities five years ago.

The decision clears the way for federal prosecutors to review the phone records of the two reporters for several weeks in the fall of 2001. The prosecutor, U.S. Atty. Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Chicago, says the records will help point to the source of the leak.

The New York Times maintains it has a 1st Amendment right to protect the confidentiality of its sources. Floyd Abrams, the newspaper's lawyer, said, "There has been no claim of wrongdoing against the Times reporters. The only thing at issue here is a leak investigation in which the government seeks to obtain information on who spoke to the journalists."

Two years ago, lawyers for the newspaper went before a federal judge in New York and won an order that barred the prosecutor from examining the phone records.

But in August, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that order in a 2-1 decision. The prosecutor has a "compelling interest" in learning who tipped off the reporters to the planned raids, thereby "endangering federal agents" and permitting the "targets to spirit away incriminating information," said Judge Ralph K. Winter in the appeals court opinion.

"We see no danger to the free press in so holding," he added. "Learning of imminent law enforcement asset freezes or searches and informing targets of them is not an activity essential … to journalism."

The Supreme Court has never squarely ruled that the news media has a 1st Amendment right to protect its confidential sources. On Monday, the justices turned down an emergency plea from the Times in a one-line order.

This is the second time in two years that the Times and its former reporter Judith Miller have been on the losing end of a legal battle with Fitzgerald. Besides being the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Fitzgerald is the special prosecutor who was named to look into who leaked to the media the name of former CIA agent Valerie Plame.

In that case, Fitzgerald sought the cooperation of several reporters who spoke with top officials of the Bush White House, but Miller refused, citing the 1st Amendment.

Fitzgerald went to court to compel Miller's cooperation, and the Supreme Court refused the Times' request to intervene. Miller spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to talk to Fitzgerald.

The probe of the two Muslim charities — the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation — intensified after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Officials believed the two groups might be funding terrorists in the Mideast, and they moved to freeze their assets.

On Dec. 4, 2001, the FBI raided the offices of the Holy Land Foundation. The day before, Miller had called one of its officials asking for comment on the government's plans to move against it. She wrote in one story that she had been tipped off by "confidential sources."

A similar sequence of events happened a few days later. On Dec. 13, 2001, Times reporter Philip Shenon contacted the Global Relief Foundation seeking comment on the government's plan to freeze its assets. The foundation's office was raided the next day, and FBI agents reported that charity officials had removed many items.

Fitzgerald then began a probe into who in the government spoke to the reporters.

Robert Kennedy: On the Mindless Menace of Violence

2006-11-27T07:37:00.000-08:00

Below is the text of Robert F. Kennedy's speech, which is prominently integrated into the film "Bobby." RFK's speech was in reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King the day before.

On the Mindless Menace of Violence

City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

71%: Dems Have No Plan for our Biggest Problem

2006-11-15T06:44:00.000-08:00

Perhaps shocking to most, but not the B23, here is polling data that 71% of the public knows or suspects that the Dems have no plan for Iraq.

If you believe the election was largely "about Iraq," and wonder whether the 'Pubs shot themselves in the foot, it's almost impossible to argue that the 'Pubs didn't blow this election, all by themselves:

"57 percent of all adults in the AP-Ipsos poll said Democrats do not have a plan for Iraq; 29 percent said they do.

"That finding strikes at the heart of a Democratic dilemma. The party has been of one voice in criticizing President Bush's strategy for the war but has been more equivocal on how to move in a different direction."

Actually, the AP spun this data a bit. 71% said the Dems either did not have a plan for Iraq, or the respondent was "not sure" if the Dems had a plan. Note, the respondents were 34% Dem, 28% Republican.

And, if the sample size had been more like the actual 37%/36% party affiliation split (that is, had the sample NOT been overweighted, again, with Dems), you would have had 15%-20% more Republicans in the survey. How would Republicans, versus "Dems," "independents" or "other," have answered the question? Methinks the poll would have shown about 5% +/- more "no plan" responses.

A correctly weighted poll (matching the actual partisan affiliation of the country) would have been more like 76% "No Plan/Not Sure", vs. 24% "Have a Plan".

Note: One week after a national election, wherein hundreds of millions of dollars was spent on media, how do you interpret the 14% who are "not sure" whether the Dems have a plan for Iraq?

As is often said, there is a permanent 15% class... .

Heat It Up and Serve It Again, 40 Years Later

2006-11-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

This leftist prescription, disguised as a "study," takes Bummer back to 1970's/1980's radical professors.

Or, to the great Repo Man quote: "I blame society -- society made me what I am."

***

WASHINGTON - Flawed government policies and negative stereotyping of minority men have limited their economic opportunities, a new study says. It urges improved health care and education for minorities and less media consolidation.

The study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research and policy group that focuses on issues that affect minorities, examined the impact of U.S. policies on men of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American descent.

It said the media and entertainment industries overrepresent minorities as criminals and whites as victims and law enforcers. Blacks are twice as likely as white defendants to be subject to negative pretrial publicity, it said. For Hispanics, three times as likely.

Meanwhile, federal laws such as the No Child Left Behind Act have hurt minorities by driving good teachers away from high-poverty schools to better-funded ones where whites are more highly represented, the report contends.

"We have a duty to stop now and reverse course," says the report, which was commissioned by a group led by Oakland Mayor-elect Ron Dellums.

It comes as Democrats seek to plot a legislative agenda after regaining control of Congress in last week's elections for the first time since 1994.

Democratic congressional leaders have pledged to raise the minimum wage and step up oversight of government agencies.

On another subject the report addresses, the Federal Communications Commission is reviewing the hotly disputed issue of whether to ease government rules to allow for more media consolidation.

Two FCC members, both Democrats, have criticized the idea of consolidation under fewer owners as a threat to minority and niche programming.

The Dellums commission is opposing FCC proposals that would allow media conglomerates to own more broadcasting stations.

Dellums, a Democratic former congressman, said government leaders should be mindful of the plight of lower-income people after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina exposed racial and class divides.

"If you look at this election, not only Iraq but Katrina was on the minds of many voters," said Dellums in a telephone interview. "Katrina exposed the stark reality of the vulnerability of urban life."

"We will have to address the question of the plight of young men of color as the crime rate rises, as the school dropout rate continues to rise, as the poverty rate continues to rise," he added.

According to the report:

_Minorities generally receive inferior health care because they can't afford medical insurance and health facilities are either subpar or nonexistent in their communities.

_White families are more than twice as likely as black families to be upwardly mobile; black families are more than twice as likely to be downwardly mobile. The report attributes higher unemployment rates for minorities in part to poor schooling, discrimination and a mismatch between where they live and where jobs are.

_Minority youth, who make up 23 percent of all Americans aged 10-17, comprise 52 percent of the prison youth population.

The commission recommends that Congress make it a top priority to establish universal health coverage — and that all states extend health coverage to all uninsured children through the age of 18 who are not covered by state Medicaid or other insurance programs.

The report calls on the government to increase the minimum wage and the availability of student loans, and to re-examine sentencing requirements that imprison nonviolent offenders for long periods.

Labor groups such as the AFL-CIO also are committing to help, with plans to offer job training, create distance learning centers and provide mentoring by role models including former NFL players. The program will begin in New Orleans — which bore the brunt of devastation from Katrina — and then be expanded to other major cities.

"The AFL-CIO recognizes the bleak employment prospects for the young men documented by the Dellums Commission," said Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. "The labor movement embraces the report's recommendations and is committed to taking decisive action to improve the environment for them."

Rubbers and Fences

2006-11-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

Over the years, the Vatican took the position that condoms were a sin. That thin latex barrier between one side and another, was immoral. It kept the "idea thing" of little Catholics from being born (conception is now the gleam in the eye?), and promoted the idea that sex might be for a purpose other than creation.

Like its anti-condom stance of yore, the Vatican now attacks another "inhuman" barrier:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - A senior Vatican cardinal on Tuesday condemned the building of walls between countries to keep out immigrants and said Washington's plan to build a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border was part of an "inhuman program".

Cardinal Renato Martino [said] .... "Speaking of borders, I must unfortunately say that in a world that greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall with joy, new walls are being built between neighborhood and neighborhood, city and city, nation and nation," said Martino, head of the Vatican's Council for Justice and Peace. Asked if the U.S.-Mexican fence was the wrong thing to do, Martino said: "Yes, that's exactly what it is." Martino praised Mexican and U.S. bishops for opposing what he called "an inhuman program, which is what the construction of that wall and all others is".

Al-Reuters cannot help tossing in a little dig at Israel:

"Israel is building a barrier comprised of concrete and razor-topped steel fences along and inside the occupied West Bank. It says the barrier, which is about half-finished, stops suicide bombers. Palestinians call it a land grab that will deny them the viable state they seek in the West Bank and Gaza."

That Election Thingy

2006-11-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

It's too early for Bummer to accurately process - as in, smart guy analysis - the 2006 midterm elections. Suffice for now, some thoughts, which are more emotional reactions, than analysis. Since the emotions will fade, best to record them, accurate or not:

- I'm happy the Dems took one house of Congress.

- I'm (surprisingly) neutral that the Dems took both houses.

- Perhaps I'm not paying enough attention, but I don't identify or bond with a single Congressional or Senate 'Pub. No leader inspires me. Zip. Leaderless.

- I'm looking forward to the circus show of some Democrat antics.

- I'm looking forward to a leftist house leadership - Pelosi - trying to keep control over the far-left foilhat committee chairmen. Oh boy.

- Ditto, the Senate.

- I'm worried that I've come to appreciate the Congress as a monkey house. I used to work there. I used to take it seriously. Now, I'm more interested in it, as a monkey show.

- Sorry, B23, but I place a healthy blame for my monkey house attitude on the 'Pubs. They've controlled the show for a dozen years, half of it with Bush in office. I can't blame the NYTimes for all of it.

- "Absolute power corrupted, absolutely."

- I cannot believe that the Mexican border still sits open, and 15 million or so illegal immigrants remain on spring break here, and that the 'Pubs did ... nothing. There is rumor that the border fence was a chimera - that a trick was employed to make it appear to be approved, but rather, it wasn't funded, in fact. It will never be built. This fraud, alone, is a microcosm of my disgust over the Pubs. "Absolute power corrupts, absolutely." Don't let the door slam your rump on the way out. Sure, the wrong guys -- the House Pubs - got punished, I get it, I was learned real good in skool, but ... who else could be punished?

- Congress will skid to gridlock. In a system paralyzed by inertia, Big Ideas emerge. Witness, Reagan. That same Petri dish now exists. Thesis; Antithesis; Synthesis.

- I liked Rumsfeld. A good man. His pre-9.11 plans toreorganize the Pentagon clashed with the military-industrial complex. He made enemies, quick. Those ememies have leaked and tweaked him ever since 9.11. I support him. Iraq is a mess, but ... call me crazy, I like Rumsfeld, and I support him.

- A little word to the B23 - thanks for stopping by here and there.

Missouri Libertarians Hand The Senate to the Dems

2006-11-08T06:29:00.000-08:00

So Bummer goes to the neighbor's garage yesterday and votes. Only races really up for grabs here in California were the tax-and-spend ballot initiatives.

So what did Bummer do? He voted against almost all of them. A spiteful little move. And then, he voted Libertarian for every office. Not that he knew any Libertarian candidate. Not that he knew, or agreed with, any platform. Bummer's vote was meaningless (the Dems alway run the table here, except Arnold won in a cakewalk over some dweeb), so Bummer got to act out a little stage play, right in the garage.

And Bummer wanted to throw a hissy fit and say, "I vote 'No Confidence' in all, y'awl."

Now, the 'Pubs lost the House, and the Senate. Control of the Senate - the committee chairmanships, nominations, and of Congress generally - came down to Missouri. (Senator Talent led early, then lost in the wee hours, thereby throwing the Senate to the Dems.)

Bummer's comment is this:

U.S. Senator Precincts Reporting 3678 of 3746

Talent, Jim REP 986,007 47.4%
McCaskull, Claire DEM 1,028,375 49.5%
Gilmour, Frank LIB 46,977 2.3%

Add the 46,977 Libertarian votes to Talent's total, and he'd have 1,032,984. 1,032,984 beats 1,028,375.

The Libertarian protest vote swung the Senate, and history.

What a different world we'd have awakened too, today, if those pissed off Bummerites in Missouri hadn't thrown their own version of a temper tantrum in those garages back in Kansas City.

Bummer doesn't know why those Missourites voted Libertarian, in such a close race. But the Republicans earned this fist to the chin, all by themselves. It's not like the Dems had any compelling message to vote for.

MSM Thug General Gets Benched

2006-11-07T14:39:00.000-08:00

Dean Baquet, Editor of the left-leaning L.A. Times, has been canned.

I thought there would be a significant editorial moderation with the recent changes of the publisher and the editorial page editor. But other than the 86'ing of right-leaning cartoonist and a Bush-bashing leftist columnist, nothing changed.

The L.A Times changed its font and format a few weeks ago. Perhaps coincidental to the November elections, I've notice that the front page coverage (mainly, choice of headlines, photos, placement, etc.) seemed to me to veer left again...and it was already left-leaning. Perhaps I was just more attuned to the bias, given the election cycle.

Anyway, let's see if a new editor fixes the perenniel left-bent problems with the front page of the L.A. Times.

More likely, a purchase will be announced shortly, and the buyer (velvet mafia don David Geffen) wanted all the dirty work done, pre-acquistion.

Update: Two billionaires bid to acquire Tribune

Neocons Hit Back at Thug MSM

2006-11-05T11:12:00.000-08:00

Vanity Fair - a perfectly named medium celebrating the Hollywood-NYC-Beltway liberal elite delights - publishes a just-before-the-election release callled,

Neo Culpa: Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.

But...

David Frum:

"There has been a lot of talk this season about deceptive campaign ads, but the most dishonest document I have seen is this press release from Vanity Fair ... Vanity Fair added words outside the quote marks to change the plain meaning of quotations...In short, Vanity Fair transformed a Washington debate over "how to correct course and win the war" to advance obsessions all their own. "

Richard Perle:

"Vanity Fair has rushed to publish a few sound bites from a lengthy discussion with David Rose. Concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday’s election, I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before the election.

"I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country."

"Get Out"

2006-11-05T07:48:00.000-08:00

At least the Iraqi judiciary knows how to handle leftwing nutjob thugs:

During Sunday's hearing, Saddam initially refused the chief judge's order to rise; two bailiffs pulled the ousted ruler to his feet and he remained standing through the sentencing, sometimes wagging his finger at the judge.

Before the session began, one of Saddam's lawyers, former U.S. AttorneyGeneral Ramsey Clark* , was ejected from the courtroom after handing the judge a memorandum in which he called the trial a travesty.

Chief Judge Raouf Abdul-Rahman pointed to Clark and said in English, "Get out."

___
* - President Truman appointed Ramsey Clark's father as Attorney General. "Tom Clark was my biggest mistake... . It's just that he's such a dumb son of a bitch." He later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Lyndon Johnson despised Associate Justice Tom Clark. There is ample speculation that master politician Johnson knew that by appointing dull stick Ramsey Clark as A.G., his father would be forced to resign from the Supreme Court, as Tm Clark would be forced to recuse himself from every case in which the United States was a party. Ramsey dim-wittedly accepted the appointment, thus forcing his father to resign.

So much for 25-watt bulb Ramsey Clark's ability to look 10 yards down the field.

Electoral Wants vs. Electoral Gets

2006-11-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

Bummer isn't following the polls (too busy at work conspiring to make mind poison for mass audiences.)

But Bummer's Big Dumb Insular View:

Nice if it happens: Bummer likes the populist streak of the House. Bummer likes the House Republican attitudes about immigration. Bummer hopes the 'Publicans keep the House, so that the grass roots will (a) continue to challenge Bush and (b) will keep the foilhat leftists from gaining control of all the House committees.

Bummer wouldn't mind the Senate going Dem. This would be a decent -- but non Jacobian - check and balance upon the 'Publican control of the White House, the House, the Judiciary and the Bureaucracy...

What will happen: Bummer has a sneaky, uninformed, downright delusional hunch that the 'Pubs will retain effective control over both houses of Congress. The Kerry anti-soldier quip greatly helps Republican get-out-the-vote efforts, because it GREATLY pissed off the 'Pub base, who otherwise were threatening to sit at home in protest of Bush (none of which "pissed off and I want to show it" attitude will show up in week-old "likely voter" polling).

And ..... let's not forget this little Saddam publicity matter, 36 hours before the polls open. A death sentence for Saddam ... I can't imagine the Leftists spinning that to their benefit. It would help burnish the emotional feeling that, things are not for naught, in Iraq. That helps Republicans, meaning that the Republican base will actually go vote, proudly, not intimidated or swayed by the MSM's 24/7 message that Iraq is a disaster.

Of course, many or most who have looked at data (Bummer has not) believe - based upon polls - that the Dems will take both houses. Such polls (a) are based upon predictions of likely voters, which with the Dems always involve iffy math, and (b) don't capture the gestalt of the waning days of the campaigns -- that is, when people actually decide whether to go jogging, go to Starbucks or go vote, and what affects those decisions on micro and macro levels.

Bummer thinks the last-minute Kerry and Saddam developments will have some marginal effect upon those decisions, at a micro level, and that the macro effect simply will not be reflected in stale polling from the last week.

For certain: We'll know in a few days!

ABC News: "Of Course We're Leftist Thugs"

2006-10-31T08:54:00.000-08:00

Mark Halperin is the Political Director of ABC News. Below is an interview of Mark Halperin by Hugh Hewitt regarding Halperin's new boo, "The Way To Win," on the The Hugh Hewitt Show:

***

HH: Of those hundreds [of ABC News staff members who Halperin works with], what percentage do you think fairly, honestly, are liberal, and would vote Democratic if they voted?

MH: The same as in almost every old media organization I know, which is well over 70%.

HH: Isn’t it…Thomas Edsall, in an interview that I know you read, because you wrote me about it, he said 95…

MH: I think 95’s well overstated…

HH: He said 15-25:1 in the Washington Post, liberal to conservative. Do you think that’s fair?

MH: Absolutely. And again, I mean, look. John and I work for old media organizations. We write things in the book that most people in old media won’t admit. But we’re proud of our organizations, but I don’t want to say it’s singular to ABC. It’s in all these…it’s an endemic problem. And again, it’s the reason why for forty years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake.

HH: And so, given that we know that proportion is there, I don’t know the relevance that the fever swamp generates some antagonism towards you, that Daily Kos yells at you, doesn’t in any way, I think, not you personally, but media, doesn’t in any way change the basic underlying problem, which is that you’ve set up sort of castles full of liberal and hard left reporters, and that they’re criticized from the left doesn’t in any way diminish their left wing bias, does it?

MH: Not at all. It only adds to the current problems, or the previous problems of the left wing bias on a lot of issues. What it adds is, people feeling cowed from the other direction, and it adds to the general lack of respect, which we have brought on ourselves, because look, we are too weak, and we are too superficial, and we have failed to stand up to power, as we should, if we’re going to play a proper role in a democracy. So the left criticisms, I think, don’t diminish the liberal bias, but they do make weak organizations, already under siege, more under siege, taking fire from a different direction.

...HH: .. I think my giant unified field theory here is that liberal media has destroyed the necessity of the left having to debate, having to reach a message across, because you guys have always papered over the weakness of their arguments. And so, in essence, by creating an echo chamber, and by allowing them to get away with saying silly things, you’ve destroyed the incentive to be smart and facile.

MH: I agree.

MSM Coverage Skews Dem....Gosh, You're Kidding..

2006-10-31T08:45:00.000-08:00

Ummm...Gosh, really?

Heavy coverage at midterm favors Democrats, study says

The media mix
By Peter Johnson

Network news coverage has favored Democratic candidates in the midterm election, and the page scandal involving former congressman Mark Foley has been the main story line, drawing almost as much coverage as Iraq and terrorism combined, a new study finds.

An analysis by the Center for Media and Public Affairs of midterm election stories aired on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts Sept. 5-Oct. 22 found that 2006's coverage has been almost five times as heavy as in the 2002 midterm elections: 167 stories, compared with 35 four years ago.

The study found that three out of four evaluations of Democratic candidates' chances of winning — such as sound bites — were positive, compared with one out of eight for Republicans. Coverage has been dominated by two major themes: the effects of the Foley scandal, and the impact the Bush presidency is having on the party's congressional candidates.

The Foley scandal produced 59 stories alone, compared with 33 on Iraq and 31 on terrorism/national security issues. “What's hurting Republican candidates is the media's focus on two non-candidates: Mark Foley and George W. Bush,” says center director Robert Lichter.

Because of the focus on Foley, the re-election race of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., was featured in 42 stories. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was featured in 10 stories, even though he's not up for re-election this year. Sen. Hillary Clinton's possible 2008 presidential run was grist for nine stories.

A Little Middle East Tea-Leaf Reading

2006-10-30T08:31:00.000-08:00

Militant factions at war with each other. Jihad and civil war becoming indistinguishable. Each accusing the other sect of various transgressions, including collusion with the unclean West.

Big building going up in Dubai, the Burj Dubai. Tallest building in the world.

A symbol of modernism and internationalism, perhaps.

***

Will the forces of medieval islamofascism allow the Burj Dubai to stand as a testament to islamic modernism and internationalism?

I Wanna Hold Your Hand...

2006-10-30T08:09:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, Bummer would say just about anything to a girl, if he thought it would improve his chances. "Do I like to line dance? Sure, I Love It!" Etc.

Graduate students, in Bummer's day, tended to be male. Bummer has an image of female graduate students. Let's just say, they tended to be in upper-level English courses or the Art School, and they liked to hang out at the pub where the scrappy guitar guy with the beret did 4 solo sets a night.

Anyway, so why does it not surprise Bummer that it's possible -- quite possible -- that a guy leaving a polling station will tell a female graduate student pollster, pretty much whatever he thinks she wants to hear (and that isn't, "I just voted Republican"):

"The late Warren Mitofsky, who conducted the 2004 NEP exit poll, went back and found that the greatest difference between actual results in exit poll precincts and the reports phoned in to NEP came where the interviewers were female graduate students -- and almost all the discrepancies favored the Democrats."

Pollser Michael Barone has more, here.

"Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Let me whisper in your ear...!!!"

A Million 'Raqi Pieces II

2006-10-29T11:20:00.000-08:00

Archive piece, but germane:

****

Now, Bummer ain't all that modest. 'Specially when he sorta nails it, before others.

You've read here before (here, here, here, here) that under the Wolfowitz Plan - the strategic reason for invading Iraq - that a "unified Iraq" was neither necessary nor sufficient, respecting the ultimate efficacy of the Wolfowitz Plan in Iraq.

Michael J. Totten's blog, "Middle East Journal," runs a good analysis explaining that the Kurds have already left the Iraqi building:

"In January 2005 the Iraqi Kurds held an informal referendum. More than 80 percent turned out to vote. 98.7 percent of those voted to secede from Iraq. Not only have the Kurds long dreamed of independence, when they look south they see only Islamism, Baathism, blood, fire, and mayhem. If Middle Easterners had drawn the borders themselves, Iraq wouldn’t even exist. Blame the British for shackling Kurds and Arabs together when they created the new post-imperial and post-Ottoman map."

Don't fear the Balkanization of Iraq. Realize that it is part of the intellectual underpinnings of the Wolfowitz Plan. It will take a generation (or two) for the Plan to fully work its way, exposing the various Big Lies of the Middle East, sufficient to break the intertia.

Think about it: The crack-up of Iraq is almost a given. The original Wolfowitz Plan was a plan to break up Iraq, into Saddam-controlled and U.S.-controlled (free) parts. The gamble was that Iraqis would prefer the U.S.-controlled part, and that process would topple Saddam from within. (Hey, it worked in Iron curtain Europe...)

Now, Iraq is in a mini-civil war. But let's level with ourselves - that is pretty much what the Wolfowitz Plan intended - internal strife as Iraqis battled their despots. We visualized a "revolution" where Iraqis overthrow Saddam. The US military sorta turbo-charged the TV images of that revolution - the difference now is that the revolution is a low-grade civil war, and the despots are in the minority, rather than in control.

The Kurds, who are not centrally embroiled in the civil war, are quietly setting up their own country. An arab, muslim democracy, amidst a "revolution."

Exactly what was prescribed.

Why Bummer Isn't A Bush Fan

2006-10-29T08:15:00.000-08:00

Some of the Bummer '23 don't like Bummer's occasional foray into long-term "economic disaster" lecturing. 'Specially when Bummer is critical of Mr. Bush.

It ain't Iraq that's got my craw.

Bush had the political capital to be a Roosevelt or a Reagan, and he blew it.

OK. Let's let the chief numbers guy speak, instead:

***************************************************************
GAO Chief Warns Economic Disaster Looms

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."

But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.

Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.

From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.

What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.

There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.

"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity - maybe Oprah - to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.

Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy - he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.

"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States - basically, the government's chief accountant - he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.

This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.

"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.

Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today - as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September - issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.

Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.

So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.

To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.

Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.

A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.

And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.

But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.

And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.

Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.

Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall - the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs - over time.

By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.

Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.

"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."

Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.

Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps - $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare - and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.

Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders - primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners - have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.

In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.

More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.

A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.

Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.

But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit - the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.

"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.

You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.

"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.

The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.

"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.

But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.

So maybe a solution is at hand.

"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.

But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.

"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."

Just Another Fed-Up Non-Aligned Pussy Moderate

2006-10-27T12:37:00.000-07:00

The female writers score a hat trick today.

Bummer likes the results of a balance of power. The Republican Party - whatever that means - has controlled 2-1/2 to 3 branches of government for 6 years now.

If you are Republicanish - and I think a good share, and perhaps a majority, of the B23 are - do you think that the Republicans have done a good job for 6 years, in full control of the government? Or, do you find yourself defining the benefits of 6 years of Republican control, only by referencing that "it would be a lot worse" if Dems were in partial or full control?

Now, mind you, that's a perfectly fine rationale. Living beats dying, and most things beat a sharp stick in the eye.

The Republicans get a pass from me on Iraq. (Call me crazy...it's war.) Bush, however, blew all of his 2004 re-election currency on Social Security reform, done in by the "personal accounts" footnote which allowed the Dems to scuttle the reform as a Wall-Street gambit. A debacle. It will bankrupt the program in 30 years.

Bush has botched immigration reform and enforcement. Absolutely blew it.

Bush's Medicare and prescription drug benefit giveaway, dwarfs anything that Wilbur Mills cooked up back in the 70's. It will bankrupt the nation in 25-30 years.

The nation is begging for leadership in weaning the country off of oil. Like JFK, setting a goal ("man on the moon this decade") and then spending like a sailor ashore to make it happen. Bush has squandered this opportunity. In 10 years, we will be in horrible shape. I'm talking geopolitically f*cked, not about so-so science of global-warming.

***
Anyway, back to the chicks.

Peggy Noonan is, with others, sanquine, perhaps, with likely Repuplican losses the week after next - "Is There Progress Though Loss?":

I said I thought the Republicans would take it on the chin in 2006, and that would force the beginning of wisdom. She surprised me. She was after all a significant staffer giving all her energy to helping advance conservative ideas within the Congress. "Yes," she said, in a quiet, deadly way. As in: I can't wait. As in: We'll get progress only through loss.
That's a year ago, from the Hill.
This is two weeks ago, from a Bush appointee: "I hope they lose the House."
And one week ago, from a veteran of two GOP White Houses: "I hope they lose Congress." Republicans this year don't say "we" so much.
What is behind this? A lot of things, but here's a central one: They want to fire
Congress because they can't fire President Bush.

Why the Blue Dress Mattered

2006-10-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

Camille Paglia's critique of the feminist movement, the National Organization of Women (NOW) and other leftists was all but drowned-out by the MSM.

So Paglia Camille gets a rare double-posting from Bummer today, as her Salon interview succinctly reiterates Why MonicaGate Mattered*:

"And with the Democrats' record of sex scandals, what the hell were they thinking of? For heaven's sake, after we just got through the whole Clinton maelstrom! What Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was far worse than any evidence I've seen thus far about what Foley did with these pages. Clinton, whom I voted for twice, used his superior power as an employer to lure Monica Lewinsky, who was perfectly willing, into these squalid sexual assignations on the grounds of the White House. There was a time when feminists were arguing, in regard to sexual harassment in the workplace, that any gross disparity in power cannot possibly produce informed consent. All of a sudden, all of that was abandoned for partisan reasons in the Clinton case. ...But to use the hallway off the Oval Office for those encounters -- to be serviced by a young woman to whom he gave no other dignity and whom he used like a washrag -- he turned that hallway into a sleazy mosh pit!"

___
* - Also, the President engaged in bold-faced lying under oath, with DNA evidence busting him, will have material adverse effects upon the zeitgeist of the young, as such behavior became so aggressively defended by the political and media elite of the country. It f*cks with kid's morals and heads, and will play out over the next generation.

Foley Buggery Thuggery II

2006-10-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

Camile Pagilia, a clear-thinking liberal conservative who was a lone feminist voice in skewering NOW and the feminist lobby for their jawdropping hypocracy over MonicaGate, comments on the junction of MSM thuggery with Foley buggery:

" Mark Foley was never on the radar of anyone outside the small circle of news junkies. So his fall and banishment from Washington were nothing ... the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election.

"Every time I turned on the news it was "Foley, Foley, Foley!" -- and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points. ... I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party.
"We saw the beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian. ... You'd expect this stuff from right-wing ideologues, not progressives.
"...It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way."

Another Thug Loss in the Courts

2006-10-25T08:36:00.000-07:00

Bummer is a day late commenting on NYTimes stuff, 'cuz he dumped the home delivery after one too many front-page seditious articles by the Times.

The Times has just lost another "immunity" claim in Court. Like the boy who cried wolf one too many times, or perhaps Chicken Little (pick your fable), the MSM has eviscerated its legitimate claim to some reasoned level of 1st Amendment "immunity" by its continual, illegitimate use of immunity claims for partisan purposes.

Accordingly, when a legitimate (i.e., "real journalism") instance comes along, the NYTimes has shat the immunity sheets so badly, that one can't help cast the claim in the worst light. Anyway, here's the latest:

Times Is Ordered to Reveal Columnist’s Sources
By Neil A. Lewis

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — A federal magistrate judge has ordered The New York Times to disclose the identities of three confidential sources used by one of its columnists, Nicholas Kristof, for columns he wrote about the investigation of the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001.

The order, issued Friday by Magistrate Judge Liam O’Grady, requires the newspaper to disclose the identities of the three sources to lawyers for Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who has brought a defamation suit against The Times. The order was disclosed Monday.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The Times, said the newspaper would appeal the ruling.

Dr. Hatfill, a germ warfare specialist who formerly worked in the Army laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md., has asserted that a series of columns by Mr. Kristof about the slow pace of the anthrax investigation defamed him because they suggested he was responsible for the attacks.

Five people died in the attacks. Although the federal authorities identified Dr. Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the case, they have not charged him with any crimes.

At a deposition on July 13, Mr. Kristof declined to name five of his sources for the columns, but two have subsequently agreed to release him from his pledge of confidentiality. Judge O’Grady’s ruling identifies the remaining unnamed sources as two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and a former colleague or friend of Dr. Hatfill at Fort Detrick.

The judge ruled that the laws of Virginia applied and that under that state’s law, reporters have only a qualified privilege to decline to name their sources that may be outweighed by other factors.

He wrote that for Mr. Hatfill to have a chance of meeting his burden of demonstrating that he was defamed by the columns, he “needs an opportunity to question the confidential sources and determine if Mr. Kristof accurately reported information the sources provided.”

Mr. Kristof wrote about a government scientist he initially referred to as Mr. Z, saying he had become the overwhelming focus of the investigation. In August 2002, he wrote that Dr. Hatfill had acknowledged he was Mr. Z. at a news conference in which he said he had been mistreated by the news media.

The lawsuit was originally dismissed by a federal judge in Virginia in 2004. A divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond reinstated the case and the full appeals court, by a 6-to-6 vote, declined to overturn that ruling. The Supreme Court declined to intervene last March.

Judge O’Grady wrote: “The court understands the need for a reporter to be able to credibly pledge confidentiality to his sources. Confidential sources have been an important part of journalism, which is presumably why Virginia recognizes a qualified reporter’s privilege in the first place.”

He said Virginia law required the use of a three-part balancing test as to whether there is a compelling need for the information, whether the information is relevant and whether it may not be obtained any other way.

Pragmacon Redux

2006-10-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

With the White House confab going on this weekend over Iraq, let's revisit an interesting series of essays/predictions from December 2004, initiated by Kerry Spot's Jim Geraghty (original post doesn't appear in his archives; too bad) and Powerline regarding so-called "Pragmatic Conservatives" and Iraq.

As Powerline summarized Gerahty:

Jim Geraghty at the Kerry Spot predicts that 2005 will see the emergence of "Pragmacons" -- a new self-proclaimed “middle group” of conservatives who share the pro-democratic goals and ideals of the neoconservatives, but who believe that "American options and resources in this effort are limited by a faulty U.S. intelligence system and the Herculean difficulties of turning 'subjects' into 'citizens.'"

Interesting to see how it shakes out. Bummer's take back in December 04 was that a partitioned Iraq was a perfectly acceptable goal of the Iraq War:

Jim Geraghty thoughtfully writes:

“… 'Okay, bringing democracy to Iraq hasn’t worked as well as we hoped or expected. What do we learn from this?'

"… 'Pragmacons' … will share the ideals of the 'neocons' - spreading democracy, pluralism, free markets, free speech and religious freedom throughout the world, and relentlessly crushing Islamist terror networks and the rogue states that snuggle with them. But the Pragmatic Cons will also conclude that American options and resources in this effort are limited...."

***
True, I guess, if you define our stated Iraq objectives as bringing democracy to all
areas of Iraq, as one family. But don’t forget the basic and critical “Wolfowitz Plan” element underlying it all. U.S. objectives are far grander - which might require a more modest Iraqi democracy. The key Wolfowitz objective is establishing and supporting an Islamic democratic zone in the region. In short, such democratic zone will, over a generation, break the vicious cycle of despotism and radicalism, in the same manner that the daily exhibition of freedom and wealth under post WW-II Western European democracies taught the common man behind the Iron Curtain which social ordering was better, despite all efforts by the Soviet Bloc to the contrary. The Bloc collapsed.

Establishing an Islamic democracy zone(s) is the strategy. Doing so in Iraq is a tactic. Doing so in Iraq while preserving a "unified Iraq" - that is, with pre-invasion borders - is neither a strategy nor a tactic. It's a minor goal, which can and should be jettisoned if and as needed. As one or more democratic zones are established in Iraq, the pre-invasion borders may or may not stay the same. If they do, and one big democracy zone results, then great! If not, so what? The Iraqi borders were just some straight lines drawn on a map by some white European colonialists early in the century.

The Bush administration included the maintenance of pre-invasion Iraqi borders as a goal, but not an absolute. A unified Iraq nation (i.e., with pre-invasion borders) is not essential to long term Mideast peace and American security that necessarily follows therefrom; but a democratic Islamic zone is essential -- be it the Kurdish region, the Shi’ite region, or both of them.

75% of the population forming two democracies covering 90% of the landmass formerly known as Iraq satisfies the strategic objective. (Remember, the initial tactic under the strategy [per Wolfowitz and Richard Perle] kept Saddam in place and instead would have established a democratic zone in the western Iraqi desert at the US airbase at H3, protected by the No-Fly zone.) If some or all of the Sunni Triangle cannot be pacified at acceptable cost, then we shoulnd't waste our assets on a non-strategic, non-tactical goal. It isn't worth it.

So if we’re going to get all practical, let’s be practical. A unified Iraq is a four-run homer, accelerating the Mideast peace process by years. But a one-run homer is all we need, and perhaps all we can afford. To wit: A balkanized Iraq with two working democratic zones, territories or countries (Kurdistan; Shia’stan) satisfies the basic strategic objectives of the Plan.

So in assessing "What went wrong, and what can we learn?"," don't give short shrift to the notion that our tactical move in toppling Saddam and establishing one or more democracies - be they zones, territories or a single nation - achieved our strategic objective.

Mystified by the French attitude towards America? They're pissed off that the U.S. - all by itself - is about to conclude a successful global strategic move previously reserved to a few Europeans.

Sorta Cool

2006-10-20T01:13:00.000-07:00

ya got that right

Goes His Own Way

2006-10-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

Lennon/McCartney and Brian Wilson penned the pop soundtrack of the 60’s. To Bummer, surely Elton John/Bernie Taupin and Lindsey Buckingham similarly architected the pop music soundtrack of the 70’s.

Fleetwood Mac was the soundtrack to one's learning about girls – and then women. Learning to drink beer – and then wine or scotch or blow. The soundtrack of going to class. Of driving. It was -- the soundtrack of the teen and young adult years.

Now, imagine the Fleetwood Mac genius, Lindsey Buckingham - instead of cranking out a dozen more chart-busting Fleetwood Mac hits – instead locks himself in the hotel bathroom during a lengthy Mac reunion tour, and writes those same songs. But instead of writing them for Stevie to sing and dance to, for Christine to harmonize, for Mick to add the backbeat or John to add the deep tones, Lindsey writes them for himself. All alone. Like a troubador street performer outside the restaurant on the 3rd Street Promenade pedestrian mall. It's called, “Under the Skin.”

You won’t instantly hear any Fleetwood hits ... at first. A few licks and hooks here and there, hint at it.

But ... wait 10 days. Like a Barolo that needs 8 hours of air, it opens up. Big time. Then you realize that pretty much every song, with just a little rearrangement, could instead have been arranged by Lindsey as a massive Mac mega hit, if that had been the intent.

I won’t prattle on about which songs do what. If the opening paragraph of this post strikes you as correct, then no more need be said.

Lindsey has for 3 decades been the master of potential energy in song. He knows how to create the aural semblance that the song is choosing to keep its energy veiled. Sometimes thinly, sometimes heavily. 'Under the Skin' is a return to the Buckingham bridled subtlety of, for example, his simple yelp on the FM Live version of 'Go Your Own Way,' or the underappreciated energy and genius of 'Don't Let Me Down Again' from the pre-Mac B/N years.
It's those few licks, here and there, on 'Under the Skin' where he lets you in on the secret, that he's harnessed the mega-hit energy that otherwise would have been rendered into the Mac's 'Go Your Own Way' or pretty much any tune off of Rumours.

Almost as if,Lindsey is allowing you to hear advance copies of what are draft Mac hits before he and Richard dress them up for the group. Once you're in on that secret -- i.e., in 10 days or so - every song opens up. Like your TV suddenly switching into color mode.*

'Under the Skin' is a stunning work, if you know the Mac and if you have the time to let it open up.

The album won’t sell enough copies for cab fare, which in a perverse way makes it all that much better – it won’t be promiscuously pawed over by the masses.

Bummer's highest recommendation. Kudos to LB. Believe it.

____
*- For you Ween fans, like the expansion in the first minute of 'Exactly Where I'm At' off of 'White Pepper'.

Catastrophic Air Crash

2006-10-13T08:49:00.000-07:00

Leftwing pirate radio and MSM darling Air America plunges from 33,000 feet and slams into the asphalt somewhere in Brooklyn.

Magically, all on board will survive, as the MSM will manage to hail this bankruptcy as part of a well-thought-out, long campaign in the war against the forces of darkness.

Thinking folks know better, that the radio experiment was the dabble of a rich synchophant, with on-air dj's who were so not funny, not entertaining and not informative, that the radio network consistently drew ratings below that of their main competitor, AM-Polka Radio.

Stories abound that would-be listeners searching for the station often thought they had found Air America on the dial, when in fact they were listening to a periodic government Emergency Broadcast System anouncement that stations must run each week.

Here it comes:

"This bankruptcy will allow Air America to emerge, with a stronger voice, blah blah...!"

BergerGate Back in the News

2006-10-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

Bummer didn't like the file cleansing done by Sandy Burglar Berger.

As the recent controvery over the TV show Path to 9/11, and the Clinton outburst to Chris Wallace at Fox, demonstrated, Team Clinton really doesn't want any scrutiny of its record. Sandy Berger was a key man in cleansing that record -- to with, to sanitize classified copies of an after-action report that cataloged the failings of the Clinton approach to terrorism.

Maybe it's just protection against the Dems' investigations getting out of hand after the midterm elections, but in any event, glad to see this:

A group of House Republicans called Wednesday for a congressional investigation into the improper handling of classified documents by President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger.
Berger admitted last year that he deliberately took classified documents out of the National Archives in 2003 and destroyed some of them at his office. He pleaded guilty in federal court to one charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material and was fined $50,000.
Ten lawmakers led by House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R- Calif., and Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., released a letter calling for the House Government Reform Committee to investigate.
They asked the committee to determine whether any documents were missing from Clinton administration terrorism records, to review security measures for classified documents and to seek testimony from Berger.

North Korean Prescription

2006-10-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

North Korea is not a significant threat to the U.S. It will not have delivery vehicles for weapons anytime soon.

North Korea IS a menace to its neighbors. Industrial giant China. Industrial giant Korea. Industrial giant Japan. Superpower wannabe Russia.

Remind me: WHY do we care about North Korea? Surrounded by regional industrial giants , why isn't this a Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Russian problem?

Bummer's prescription for North Korea:

1. The U.S. becomes beligerant.
2. The U.S. declares an embargo on nuclear material coming in and out of North Korea.
3. The U.S. declares a maritime blockade of North Korea, unless North Korea abandons its nukes and submits to U.N. inspections.
4. The U.S. sets up a bureaucratic inspection station at sea, whereby every North Korean -bound ship must go into a quarantine inspection zone. Yep, it'll take 2 weeks per ship, at least.
5. A couple of U.S. submarines sink any and every ship inbound or outbound from a North Korean port, that does not comply with the search and seize rules.
6. The U.S. does nothing more. Let North Korea fester. It's a Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Russian problem. Those countries are successfully foisting their problems on the U.S. Why? Just say "no."

...Because Your Math Sucks, That's Why

2006-10-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

Peggy Noonan is best, not only when she notes the heretofore ignored 900-lb gorilla-in-a-tutu sitting in the room, but when she provides insightful commentary on the ape's wardrobe.

In reviewing Woodward's book, "State of Denial," she dresses up the argument -- which nary is mentionned in the MSM -- that, "Of course the Republican White House ignored the State Department; they had been continually and consistently wrong for several generations; why pay heed now?":

"The young, mid-level guys who came to Washington in the Reagan years were always at the table in the meeting with the career State Department guy. And the man from State, timid in all ways except bureaucratic warfare, was always going "Ooh, aah, you can't do that, the Soviet Union is so big, Galbraith told us how strong their economy is, the Sandinistas have the passionate support of the people, there's nothing we can do, stop with your evil empire and your Grenada invasion, it's needlessly aggressive!" Those guys from State--they were almost always wrong. Their caution was timorousness, their prudence a way to evade responsibility.
"The young Reagan guys at the table grew up to be the heavyweights of the Bush era. They walked into the White House knowing who'd been wrong at the table 20 years before. And so when State and others came in and said, "The intelligence doesn't support it, we see no WMDs," the Bush men knew who not to believe."

Gay Immunity

2006-10-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not really interested in the Foley mess.

***

It's difficult to fire a black woman. Almost impossible.* Because you will immediately be accused of both race and sex discrimination. The costs -- both economic and emotional (who comes to work to be branded and picketed as a racist by the local activists?) are considerable; accordingly, you tend to have a much, much higher threshold for firing a bad black female employee, vs. someone who is not of protected status. The flipside, simply not appreciated by activists,but which is SOP among bosses (Bummer knows...):

Who would you rather hire? Someone who you can fire, if they are lousy, or someone who you will be virtually unable to fire?

Professors and activists can blah blah blah all day long, but that's where the rubber meets the pavement.

***

It's difficult - almost impossible - to accuse or censure a gay of sexual misbehavior. Because the pro activists will view any criticism of the gay as an attack on his sexual orientation, rather than his misbehavior. Again, the costs are considerable, so gays tend to be left alone. The fight isn't worth it.

Gay immunity. Believe it.

____
* -- Bummer has between 50 and 100 employees at any given time, of a marvelous mix of class, religions, nationality,sex, age, etc. Bummer knows.

300k

2006-10-04T21:43:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know, some blogs gets tens or hundreds of thousands of hits per day.

But S&C just hit 300,000. In about 24 months.

That's around 400 per day. I'll assume half that is spider and bot noise. But still....maybe the Bummer 23 have increased ... .

Y'awl come back now, ya hear?

Thothes Thathssy, Thessy 'Demths

2006-10-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

Amusing: Top 10 Democrat Sex Scandals in Congress:

Key:
Homosexual
Pedophile

10. Sen. Daniel Inouye. The 82-year-old Hawaii Democrat was accused in the 1990s by numerous women of sexual harassment. Democrats cast doubt on the allegations and the Senate Ethics Committee dropped its investigation.

9. Former Rep. Gus Savage. The Illinois Democrat was accused of fondling a Peace Corps volunteer in 1989 while on a trip to Africa. The House Ethics Committee decided against disciplinary action in 1990.

8. Rep. Barney Frank. The outspoken Massachusetts Democrat hired a male prostitute who ran a prostitution service from Frank’s residence in the 1980s. Only two Democrats in the House of Representatives voted to censure him in 1990.

7. Former Sen. Brock Adams. The late Washington Democrat was forced to stop campaigning after numerous accusations of drugging, assault and rape, the first surfacing in 1988.

6. Former Rep. Fred Richmond. This New York Democrat was arrested in 1978 for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old. He remained in Congress and won re-election—before eventually resigning in 1982 after pleading guilty to tax evasion and drug possession.

5. Former Rep. John Young. The late Texas Democrat increased the salary of a staffer after she gave in to his sexual advances. The congressman won re-election in 1976 but lost two years later.

4. Former Rep. Wayne Hays. The late Ohio Democrat hired an unqualified secretary reportedly for sexual acts. Although he resigned from Congress, the Democratic House leadership stalled in removing him from the Administration Committee in 1976.

3. Former Rep. Gerry Studds. He was censured for sexual relationship with underage male page in 1983. Massachusetts voters returned him to office for six more terms.

2. Former Rep. Mel Reynolds. The Illinois Democrat was convicted of 12 counts of sexual assault with a 16-year-old. President Bill Clinton pardoned him before leaving office.

1. Sen. Teddy Kennedy. The liberal Massachusetts senator testified in defense of nephew accused of rape, invoking his family history to win over the jury in 1991.

***

What about Gary Condit and Wilbur Mills?

Balance of Power

2006-10-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

Maybe it will be a good thing for the Dems to take one house of Congress. The Dems will then have to have actual programs. The Leftie element vs. the fast-fading Centrist element will be on public display.

It's not as if the 'Pubs have been particularly effective whilst in control of all 3 branches of government.

We'll see, soon.

FoleyGate

2006-10-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

In case you've missed it, the emails sent by disgraced gay child porn fan ex-Representative Foley appear to be altered, at least in some instances.

May go all kinds of ways, including that the story -- like the faked RatherGate TANG memos -- was held back, for use just before the election. Seems like an Occam's Razor violation to me -- what could the Dems gain from holding back the story, other than (a) red herring as to the Terror War and (b) link it to the Republicans at large.

Not sure if there will be much to this, other than navel gazing. Foley is a sick perv. He got caught. Good riddance. Bigger issue? Doesn't appear to be, but let's see. Maybe he's just gay, and not into child porn (won't THAT be a quandary for the gay advocates.. see prior post). Maybe the 'Pubs wanted to keep it quiet until after a close '06 midterm, so as to not lose the seat (and maybe, the entire House?) Wouldn't THAT be a footnote to history:

"Republicans Lose House by One Member, Thanks To Gay Child Porn Fan"

Hey, if you believe that the gay marriage issue (and the balloting thereof in over a dozen states in '04) was a critical factor in Bush's victory, then ... why not?

Buggery Thuggery

2006-10-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

The gay voting bloc comprises something like 5% (who knows, though...) of the voting population. It's not so much the average (Bummer doesn't believe the bloc is of particular sway in Missouri), but in concentrated urban centers, it is powerful. The urban concentration gives the gay advocates something approaching proportional representation (i.e., the Euro-style democracies with ruling coalitions), as opposed to the winner-take-all American version of democracy.

This gay voting bloc is virtually 100% Democratic. Along with the African-American vote, it forms the core 15% of the Democratic Party.

The MSM, as Bummer's 23 know, has largely functioned as the press office of the left-of-center for the past 30+ years. That hegemony is breaking, now, thanks to alternative media, but the MSM still rules. As such, the MSM still controls and filters the message.

Millions will die because of AIDS. The truth has been known for 25 years. What is the causal connection among the gay advocacy groups, the MSM, the Democratic base, and those millions of deaths?

This AP item is of interest:

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- Almost half of the European Union population continues to have misconceptions about the ways in which HIV/AIDS can be spread, the European Commission said Monday.

A survey by the EU executive found that although many know that sharing needles, receiving infected blood and having unprotected sex were the three most prominent ways to get infected, 45 percent also believed donating blood, sharing glasses and sitting on a toilet seat could spread the disease.

Only 40 percent knew the virus could not be passed by kissing on the mouth.
"We must not lose sight of the fact that HIV/AIDS is still one of the biggest preventable killers worldwide," said Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou. "I am most worried about the decreasing attention for prevention."

Particular concern centers on the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004. "More needs to be done, in particular to inform the citizens of new EU member states, where the epidemic is still strong, and which border the countries where the epidemic is on the rise," Kyprianou said.

The AIDS pandemic is spread by one, and only one, material factor: Gay men having unprotected.... ahem... anal sex. Although there is significant support in Western countries for a "live and let live" attitude, particularly respecting attitudes toward gays, the MSM has become the propaganda office of the gay voting bloc on the AIDS issue. That is, the MSM and the gay advocates simply will not address the 900 lb. gorilla-in-a-pink-tutu sitting in the room: AIDS is a disease residing almost exclusively among men having anal sex with infected men.*

Instead, the MSM bombards the message that President Reagan caused AIDS because he didn't do anything; "women get AIDS too;" the old Haitian canard; "lack of funding is a deliberate program to eradicate gays; " etc.

There is no MSM message on point: "AIDS is spread exclusively by men having anal sex with men."

So....any wonder why people are confused about AIDS? It's been 25 years. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of $ have been spent. And at best, public understanding that "AIDS is spread exclusively by men having anal sex with men" remains elusive.

Effete thugs of the MSM. The MSM, carrying the water for the gay advocate bloc, as a core Democratic voting bloc, obfuscate the truth. And millions will die.

If that isn't thuggery, I don't know what is. Buggery thuggery.

___
*-Isolated instances of transmission via other methods are not significant enough to continue the viscious transmission cycle. That is, they are so isolated that, like two rare recessive genes, they almost never cross in the wide population.

Here is the Tokyo Rose Page Scrubbed Off of Wikipedia

2006-09-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

Tokyo Rose died. The left tries to rewrite history. The following wikipedia page got scrubbed off the site for some politically correct reason:

Iva Toguri D'Aquino (July 4, 1916 – September 26, 2006), a Japanese-American, was identified as Tokyo Rose, an identity dubbed by Allied soldiers for a series World War II propaganda-radio hostesses broadcasting from Japan. Identified as Tokyo Rose by the press after the war, she was detained for a year by U.S. military before they decided she had not committed a crime worth prosecuting. Upon return to the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation charged her with eight counts of treason. Her 1949 trial resulted in a conviction on one count, making her the seventh American to be convicted of treason. In 1974, investigative journalists found that key witnesses had lied during testimony and other serious problems with the conduct of the trial. She was pardoned by U.S. President Gerald Ford, becoming the only US citizen convicted of treason to later be pardoned.[1]

Early life
She was born Ikuko Toguri in Los Angeles, the daughter of Japanese immigrants. Her father, Jun Toguri, had come to the U.S. in 1899, and her mother in 1913. Ikuko, who went by the name Iva, was a Girl Scout as a child, and raised in the Methodist religion. She attended grammar schools in Calexico, California, and San Diego before returning with her family to Los Angeles. There she finished grammar school, attended high school, and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in Zoology. A registered Republican, she then worked in her parents' shop.

On July 5, 1941, she sailed for Japan from San Pedro, ostensibly to visit an ailing relative and to possibly study medicine. The U.S. State Department issued her a Certificate of Identification; she did not have a passport. That September in Japan, Toguri applied to the U.S. Vice Consul for a passport, stating she wished to return to the U.S. for permanent residence. Her request was forwarded to the State Department, but the answer had not returned by the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), and she was declared an enemy alien in Japan.
[edit]

Zero Hour

Toguri in December 1944 at Radio Tokyo
Following American involvement in the Pacific War, Toguri, like a number of other Americans in Japanese territory, was pressured by the Japanese central government under Hideki Tojo to renounce her United States citizenship, which she refused to do. She gained work as a typist at a Japanese news agency and eventually worked in a similar capacity for Radio Tokyo.

In November 1943, Allied prisoners of war forced to broadcast propaganda selected her to host portions of the one-hour radio show The Zero Hour. Under the stage name "Orphan Anne" and possibly "Your Favorite Enemy, Anne", reportedy in reference to the comic strip character Little Orphan Annie, Toguri performed in comedy sketches and introduced newscasts, with on-air speaking time of generally about 20 minutes. Though earning only 150 yen, or about $7, per month, she used some of her earnings to feed P.O.W.s.[2]

She married Felipe D'Aquino (last name sometimes given only as Aquino), a Portuguese citizen of Japanese-Portuguese descent, on April 19, 1945. The marriage was registered with the Portuguese Consulate in Tokyo, with Toguri declining to take her husband's citizenship.

A Rose By Any Name That Isn't Spelled 'Treason'

2006-09-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

[Update: Did Wikpedia get scrubbed? The Tokyo Rose page referenced below, URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iva_Toguri_D - somehow won't link......]

***
Wikipedia says this about Tokyo Rose:

"In November 1943, Allied prisoners of war forced to broadcast propaganda selected her to host portions of one-hour radio show The Zero Hour. Under the stage name Orphan Anne' and possibly 'Your Favorite Enemy, Anne' ... Toguri performed in comedy sketches and introduced newscasts, with on-air speaking time of generally about 20 minutes."

American military. War. A woman who is not white. An American court convicts a collaborator for treason. THIS CANNOT STAND.

The LA Times kicks into gear, to re-write history. Tokyo Rose is no longer a treasonous criminal broadcasting discouraging propaganda to 19-year old American sailors and marines, far from home. Nope. She is a HERO who "received honors" -- from whom, exactly, is of course not stated. The LA Times obituary creates the false impression that the Attorney General (who prosecuted her) knew she was innocent, as did "forces under MacArthur." (So.....One Allied sailor who later came to sympathize with her after the war - is that who the LA Times refers to as "forces under MacArthur...?)

But the LA Times must attack the "treason" word head-on. American military. War. A woman who is not white. An American court convicts a collaborator for treason. THIS CANNOT STAND.

So courtesy of the LA Times, one sympathetic left-leaning journalist tells the world:

"They wound up prosecuting the myth instead of the person," said Bill Kurtis, the broadcast journalist whose 1969 documentary for CBS, "The Story of Tokyo Rose," first told Toguri's side of the story.
"It was not propaganda, so to speak. It was produced by POWs for POWs and their parents," Kurtis said. "Her voice sounded like an American teenager, and that's what they wanted."

****

Yes, that's what "they" wanted, alright.

Let's review:

Wikipedia - not known for leaning right of center:

In November 1943, Allied POW's forced to broadcast propaganda selected Tokyo Rose to host portions of The Zero Hour.

The LA Times'* version:

It was not propaganda, so to speak. It was produced by POWs for POWs and their parents.

Compare and contrast. Papers due tomorrow morning.

_______
* - American military. War. A woman who is not white. An American court convicts a collaborator for treason. THIS CANNOT STAND.

Big Fricking Liar

2006-09-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

Bummer started a website (which never went live) back in the day - 1996 - entitled, "BigFuckingLiar.com."

The site was aimed at persons with public licenses and/or positions -- doctors, publicists, etc. -- who would step forward and cash in their legitimacy to tell a lie which was transparent. The lie had to be so egregious that Bummer would be happy under libel law to call them a liar, in public, no ifs, ands or buts.

The breaking point was when the doctor for actor Martin Lawrence issued a statement to the entertainment trades that the actor was being treated for "dehydration and exhaustion" after he went on a drug-induced, gun-waving tirade in the middle of a Valley intersection. For those who were not in Hollywood at the time, Mr. Lawrence had joined the Bobby Brown bad boy club and was "well-known as a big partier."

Why would a medical doctor cover for an overdosed star, caught on video in the middle of a street whacked out? What possible legitimacy could the doctor ever have again, when saying anything in public? He cashed in his lifelong credibility for that? The doctor should have just shut up - said nothing. So when he chose to lie, then he was fair game.

It was what it was, but Bummer wanted to offer a disincentive to the middlemen who have some measure of legitimacy, from simply lying for thugs. MonicaGate pretty much swamped the idea... .

With celebs, the drug overdose code words are: exhaustion; dehydration; prescription; doctor's care.

Anyway, if BigFuckingLiar.com were active, the site would surely feature this piece today, targetting the publicist:

A source close to Owens told ESPN's Ed Werder early Wednesday morning that Owens was suffering an adverse reaction to painkillers taken for treatment of this fractured hand.
"This is not serious," Owens' publicist Kim Etheridge said in Wednesday's online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Average Everyday Sane Psycho

2006-09-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

L.F.:

You think that I go home at night
Take off my clothes, turn out the lights
But I burn letters that I write
To you, to make you love me

Yeah, I drive naked through the park
And run the stop sign in the dark
Stand in the street, yell out my heart
To make, to make you love me

I am extraordinary, if you'd ever get to know me
I am extraordinary, I am just your ordinary

Interlude

2006-09-22T22:49:00.000-07:00

F.S.F.:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. ...

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. ... it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

That Hollywood Insider Thing

2006-09-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

..back later.....

The Left IS Soft on Islamo Fascism...

2006-09-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the left-spun Los Angeles Times for printing the following opinion piece by a Sam Harris:

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals - Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists

September 18, 2006
TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political
persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral
high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Berlin 1935, Islamabad 2006

2006-09-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

Was the Pope incorrect? How? Fascist totalitarianism. Then, and now.